Three women poets weave sensual rituals of grief, love, and luminosity. Danielle Vogel reads from her new book A Library of Light, a prose poetry memoir with meditations on cellular light and memory following her mother’s death. fahima ife performs ecstatic sonic rituals of soul retrieval in Septet for the Luminous Ones. Rounding out the line-up is Chicago emerging poet and 2024 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship finalist Stefania Gomez, who composes breathless “redwork” elegies at her loom.
Murmurs from the poets:
Wreckage, re-configuring. We are an
illuminated architecture. Nothing you
know to name. We are a moving letter.
Topologies of sound. We are never
static, but echoic. As we make shape,
we take it. The mouth,
unmarooned.
—Danielle Vogel, from A Library of Light
we let sense warp
the witnesstangle the fields
something mysticof love and its
limits
— fahima ife, from Septet for the Luminous Ones
a woman unearthed me.
Together, she and I grieved
the impossibility of disappearing
into one
another.
— Stefania Gomez, from “At the New York City AIDS Memorial”
This event is part of the Poetry Foundation’s fall 2024 season, Murmuring Americas. All Poetry Foundation events are completely free of charge and open to the public, though advanced registration is encouraged. The performance space is ADA-compliant and wheelchair-accessible, and the program will feature CART captioning and ASL interpretation. For more information about accessibility at the Poetry Foundation, please visit our Accessibility Guide.
For more information, visit the Poetry Foundation website.
Learn more about A Library of Light by Danielle Vogel and Septet for the Luminous Ones by fahima ife.
