Atria: A Poetics of Absence

With Atria, his rich, prismatic poetry 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 the rural Kentucky of his own 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 debut announces D.S. Waldman as an intrepid new voice in poetry. Copies of Atria are available for purchase with your ticket.

D. S. Waldman's writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Los Angeles Review of Books, ZYZZYVA, and 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 will be joined in conversation by David Gorin, author of To a Distant Country (August, 2025). David received the 2023 Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America and has been supported by MacDowell and Millay Arts. He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a BA, MA, and MPhil in English Literature from Yale University. In recent years he has taught creative writing and literature at the Pratt Institute, Deep Springs College, Stanford Continuing Studies, the MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution (via the Yale Pr*son Education Initiative), Eastern Correctional Facility (via the Bard Pr*son Initiative), and Yale. He curates the WAVEMACHINE poetry and performance series in San Francisco and is co-editor of The Constant Critic at Fence.

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