About this Event
Event guidelines:
- Each ticket will include either a copy of the featured book or a $10 Books Are Magic gift card.
- Additional copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event.
- A signing will follow the talk.
- Home address is collected for contact tracing purposes; it will not be used otherwise.
- The event will also be livestreamed for free here: https://youtube.com/live/gp8B8PenIJI
- As a reminder: If you are not feeling well, please do not come to the event, even if you have a ticket; email us and we'll work it out.
If you have any questions regarding these guidelines or to request accessibility accommodations, please contact [email protected].
“A powerful debut, populated with lovers and painters and musicians and poets, all of it unified by D.S. Waldman’s keen, unblinking eye.” —Patrick Phillips, author of Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America
“Refusing parallel movement, the hands/ Those empty frames. Imagine holding/ a Memory—or was it a photograph”
In this rich, prismatic collection, D.S. Waldman guides readers through the halls of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, into encounters with Georges Braque and Frida Kahlo, and back through the landscapes of coastal California and his own rural Kentucky childhood. Along the way, formally experimental poems open into intimate explorations of fraternal loss and grief, love and romantic partnership, disability and the fragile human form, and the peculiar shapes memory takes. In one section—part essay, part crown of sonnets—the poet addresses the childhood accident that forever debilitated his hand, widening his aperture to the world and transforming his perception. Ultimately, through that experience and others, Waldman asks how—or whether—one can ever truly relate to another, or to the world.
Exploring presence and absence, proximity and distance, this “gorgeous, speculative” (David Baker, author of Whale Fall) debut announces D.S. Waldman as an intrepid new voice in poetry.
D. S. Waldman is the author of the poetry collection Atria (Liveright/W. W. Norton, 2026). His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Los Angeles Review of Books, ZYZZYVA, and many other publications. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and recipient of Poetry Society of America’s Lucille Medwick Memorial Award, Waldman lives and teaches creative writing in New York City. He’s at work on a novel.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Books Are Magic Montague, 122 Montague Street, Brooklyn, United States
USD 10.89 to USD 30.48












