A rare U.S. appearance by Alice Oswald, one of our finest performers of poetry.

In Memorial, her unforgettable transformation of the Iliad, Alice Oswald breathed new life into myth. In Nobody, her latest book of poems, she returns to Homer, this time fixing her gaze on a minor character in the Odyssey—a poet abandoned on a stony island—and the sea that surrounds him.

As with all of Oswald’s work, this is poetry that is made for the human voice. Reading Nobody is like watching the ocean; we slip our earthly moorings and follow the circling shoal of sea voices into a mesh of sound and light and water—fluid, abstract, and moving with the wash of waves.

“I’m a real believer in live performance—in getting a human body, like a musical instrument, to stand up and play,” Oswald has said. “To me, that’s better than anything. I have an image of the oral poem—that thing that is always a becoming thing, always on the point of being complete. But just as it begins to complete itself, it vanishes. It’s a performance that’s kind of set up and then melts away and leaves no trace.”

This event is part of a collaboration between the Authors Guild Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, and the Strand Book Store, where we gather writers for live events that highlight the importance of a rich, diverse literary culture and the authors who contribute to it, and provide a space for writers and readers to connect in-person.