Amanda Auerbach and Jennifer Soong at Harvard Book Store

Harvard Book Store welcomes poets AMANDA AUERBACH and JENNIFER SOONG for a reading from their new collections, What Need Have We For Such As We and Near, At.

About What Need Have We For Such As We

In What Need Have We For Such as We, the speaker quickly transitions from being a lyrical poet, moved by the world and her own responses to it, to being a person infected by a poetic voice that, like a virus or a machine or a social script, has a startling and terrifying life of its own.

About Near, At

Near, At follows the inherent strangeness of one’s consciousness as it observes and comes into contact with the physical world. A sustained exploration of language, capitalism, gender, and nature, Near, At traverses and measures the movement of silence against the movement of thought and its pauses. Divided into five parts, each with its own form, and followed by a series of ongoing love poems called “My Christopher Poems,” this debut collection is slow to assume but quick to adjust. Rooted in both the traditional and the experimental, it asks just how little of ourselves we can be.