Pagan Sky (Poems 2000 – 2025) and Heartmoor
The poets will read from their new releases and then be in conversation with one another.
Pagan Sky by Michael Waters
In these richly textured poems—crafted with taut clarity and consummate skill—Waters confronts the immutable presence of death by reveling in sensual pleasure and spiritual daring. Each poem unfolds as a compelling narrative, sharpened by precise diction and lifted by lyrical grace and musical phrasing. Waters’ range is expansive, moving across geographies from Brooklyn to Romania, from the Dominican Republic to Greece, all while engaging in urgent political realities such as AIDS, Black Lives Matter, and authoritarian rule. He also draws on a vibrant cultural lineage that includes Caravaggio, Gwendolyn Brooks, Cesare Pavese, and Balthus. Pagan Sky: New & Selected Poems 2000–2025 presents a body of work that affirms Michael Waters as a singular and enduring voice in American poetry and as an artist whose poems continue to deepen, resonate, and enrich his remarkable literary legacy.
Heartmoor by Mihaela Moscaliuc
Informed by the poet’s coming of age during and immediately following Nicolae Ceaușescu’s repressive regime in Romania, Mihaela Moscaliuc’s newest collection, Heartmoor, is a lush, formally diverse collection that explores what moors and unmoors us psychologically, culturally, and spiritually. These poems reflect on in-betweenness, authoritarianism, cruelty, and complicity while still holding space for joy, wonder, and care. The legacy of Decree 770—Romania’s notorious anti-abortion law—lingers in this collection’s engagement with women’s bodies and reproductive autonomy. Heartmoor moves through the textures of daily life—mushrooms, medicinal herbs, chocolate, family, death—and into the charged, liminal spaces where the political and personal converge. Again and again, these poems remind us that touch and connection, rituals, acts of kindness and intimacy, might be, after all, the only kind of home to which we can moor our hearts, regardless of which country we inhabit—or which inhabits us.
This is a ticket for the live stream.
Choose the ticket price that’s right for you: Free, $5, $10, $15 or $20
