Rachel Eisendrath—2022 Mary Blossom Poet—Reading @ 7pm on 10/20

Rachel Eisendrath, Ph.D.—Tow Associate Professor of English and Director of the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program in the English Department at Barnard College—is the 2022 Mary Blossom Poet. Eisendrath will read from her poetry on Thursday, October 20th on Zoom (the event is free, but registration is required).

According to David Ulin's review in the Los Angeles Times, Eisendrath's Gallery of Clouds (New York Review Books, 2021) traces the influence of "the escapist pastoral."

[Eisendrath] calls her book “Gallery of Clouds” because “[c]louds are ephemeral moments of light and color that stay still only as long as you look at them, but then — as soon as your mind wanders — change into something else.”

By way of illustration, Eisendrath moves fluidly between the present and the Renaissance, between personal recollections and aesthetic arguments. She opens with a reverie in which she encounters Virginia Woolf in heaven; she considers not just Sidney but also Shakespeare, Montaigne and Walter Benjamin. She wants to take her readers “into unknown regions of the universe, maybe even into unknown regions of themselves.”

~ David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times, June 3, 2021

 

Eisendrath is also author Poetry in a World of Things: Aesthetics and Empiricism in Renaissance Ekphrasis (University of Chicago Press, 2018).

The event is free, but registration is required.