We’re excited to welcome Vincent Katz and Noa Fields to the store for a reading and conversation in celebration of Katz’s new book Daffodil. Stopping time on the page to discover the poetic moment where past and present are one, Vincent Katz (called a poet of “vibrant cinematic hunger” by Eileen Myles) opens himself to the fleeting beauty of both culture and nature in this stunning gathering of new work.

With his painterly eye and disarming concision on the page, Katz opens this book with a powerful image of “all time sequestered in the fold of a daffodil,” setting the stage for an encounter with the immediacy we must embrace to see the world around us with clarity. At the center of this collection are his captivating poems about animals—“The hope in fear / In thrill to run” of the rabbit, the snapping turtle “nestled // Next to brother rock”—as the poems continually engage with the heady passage of days and years, and the promise to honor a life in the here and now, to walk the street with the sense that, “It’s not about buying / But rather about feeling the air.”

“Whether in nature, or on a crowded or empty city street, was all a dream?” Katz writes, considering Daffodil. “Surely, there was and is still someone close, and that continues, as animals, despite war, despite incursions, continue. New York is a place of return, where we’re aware of faces and other things; there, or in a field of flowers, in places in the distant past and present, love has some inexorable way of continuing.”

These poems evoke the exact scenes that command our daily thoughts, that usher in grace and beauty, with their quietly urgent moral qualities, which, Katz suggests, can shape our days if we allow them to.

Vincent Katz is a poet, translator, and critic. He is the author of the poetry collection Daffodil, out this year from Alfred A. Knopf, as well as the collections Broadway for Paul, Southness, and Swimming Home, among others. He collaborated with Anne Waldman on the book-length poem Fantastic Caryatids and with Andrei Codrescu on A Possible Epic of Care. Katz is the author of The Complete Elegies of Sextus Propertius, translations of the Roman love poet, and is currently translating the Works and Days and the Theogony of the ancient Greek poet Hesiod. He is the editor of Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art, and his writing on contemporary art and poetry has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail and The Poetry Project Newsletter. He lives in New York City.

Noa Micaela Fields is an echodeviant (trans poet with hearing aids) in search of the hypervivid in her one and only captionless life. She is the author of E, forthcoming from Nightboat Books later this year. Find her poems and art writing in Tripwire, Zoeglossia, Tyger Quarterly, Jacket2, Poem of the Day, Sixty Inches From Center, and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago, where she is the public programs curator at the Poetry Foundation.

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Tags: Chicago, Daffodil, Lower West Side, Noa Fields, Pilsen Community Books, Vincent Katz