“and so much lost      you’d think / beauty had left a lesson”: Poetry & Grief

Under a line by Ed Roberson (from “once the magnolia has blossomed” in Asked What Has Changed, Wesleyan UP 2021), The Poetry Center co-presents with our friends Medicine for Nightmares this special program featuring two outstanding poets from New York City. Kyle Dacuyan and Mirene Arsanios will each read from their work and engage in conversation with one another and the audience. This is one of multiple Poetry Coalition programs across the country this Spring 2023 around our common theme, supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to the Academy of American Poets in support of Poetry Coalition programs.

Kyle Dacuyan is the author of INCITEMENTS (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2023), recipient of the 2023 Cy Twombly Award in Poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a 2021 NEA Fellow in Creative Writing, and Executive Director of The Poetry Project at St. Marks Church in New York City. In 2024, he will present a solo performance work, Dad Rock, at The Shed in NYC.

Mirene Arsanios is the author of The City Outside the Sentence (Ashkal Alwan, 2015), Notes on Mother Tongues (UDP, 2019), and more recently, The Autobiography of a Language (Futurepoem, 2022). She has contributed essays and short stories to e-flux journal, Vida, The Brooklyn Rail, LitHub, and Guernica, among others. Her writing was featured collaboratively at the Sharjah Biennial (2017) and Venice Biennial (2017), as well as in various artist books and projects. Arsanios co-founded the collective 98weeks Research Project in Beirut and is the founding editor of Makhzin, a bilingual English/Arabic magazine for innovative writing. She teaches at Pratt Institute and holds an MFA in Writing from the Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts at Bard College. With Rachel Valinsky, she coordinated the Friday nights reading series at The Poetry Project from 2017-19. She lives and works in Brooklyn.