Join us at the McNally Jackson Seaport, Manhattan’s own coastal refuge, as we present an evening featuring a range of brilliant minds from NYC's poetry scene.
The title for this new monthly series comes from Herman Melville’s poem “Art”. Poetry, wine, and the sea have always been inextricably intertwined. This reading series seeks to highlight poets from all over the city, and give them a backdrop of McNally Jackson’s Seaport location to read their new work. Join us to hear poems, drink wine, and enjoy the “pulsed life”.
This month's reading features Elizabeth T. Gray Jr, Terrence Arjoon, Farid Matuk, Arianne Ayu Alizio, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Elizabeth T. Gray Jr. is a poet, translator, critic, and corporate consultant. Poetry collections include After the Operation (Four Way Books 2025), Salient (New Directions 2020) and Series | India (Four Way Books, 2015). Her translations from classical and contemporary Persian include Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season, selected poems of Forough Farrokhzad (New Directions 2022, Finalist for the PEN Prize for Poetry in Translation 2023) and The Green Sea of Heaven: Eighty Ghazals from the Diwan of Hafiz: 30th Anniversary Edition (Monkfish Publishing 2024). She serves on the Boards of Kimbilio Fiction, World Poetry, Flood Editions, Friends of Writers, The Beloit Poetry Journal Foundation, and Human Rights and Democracy in Iran. She holds a BA and JD from Harvard University and an MFA from Warren Wilson College. She was the founding CEO and Managing Partner of Conflict Management, Inc. and Alliance Management Partners, LLC, boutique consulting firms. www.etgrayjr.com
The Complete Drafts of Rachel Blau DuPlessis from Coffee House Press (2025), an unusually compelling work of summation, explores topics personal, historical, and ethical with a striking array of genre and tonal variety. DuPlessis is well known for a gender-rich attitude and a lucidity and commitment to social poetics. Her considerable work on Objectivist poetry includes her pioneering editing of The Selected Letters of George Oppen.Her trilogy The Pink Guitar, Blue Studios, and Purple Passages has inspired numbers of provocative essayists with gender innovation on their mind. Among her awards are a residency at Bellagio, a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, and a year at the National Humanities Center.
Terrence Arjoon is a poet, editor, and critic whose work has appeared in Tagvverk, The Poetry Project Newsletter, and Smooth Friend, among other publications. His chapbook Acid Splash, or Into Blue Caves was published by 1080PRESS where he is an editor. His book The Disinherited is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse.
Farid Matuk is the author of the poetry collections Moon Mirrored Indivisible (UChicago, 2025); The Real Horse (UA Press, 2018); This Is a Nice Neighborhood (Letter Machine Editions, 2010); and Redolent (Singing Saw, 2021), a collaboration with artist Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez that received the Rabinowitz Prize from the Poetry Society of America. Matuk is also the translator from the Spanish of The Hormone of Darkness: A Playlist (Graywolf, 2024) by Tilsa Otta and the co-translator of Juan Felipe Herrera's Akrílica (Noemi, 2022). Matuk’s work has been supported by a Holloway Lectureship in the Practice of Poetry at UC Berkeley and a 2024 USA Fellowship.
Arianne Ayu Alizio is a poet, filmmaker, and capricorn many times over. They are pursuing a dual MFA in Film Directing and Creative Writing at CalArts, and hold a BFA in Film & TV Production from NYU Tisch. Arianne received The Poetry Project’s 2022 Brannan Prize and was a top 10 finalist for Palette Poetry’s 2023 Rising Poets Prize. They’ve screened and performed at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, The BROAD, Poetic Research Bureau, Institute of American Indian Arts, BLUM, Philosophical Research Society, Garel Fine Art Gallery, plus many rooftops, farms, bookstores, and dive bars. You may also know Arianne as the founder of Film Spells, a ritual and screening series for ciné-psychics.