What does a future poetics look and feel like? The reading series ‘Parallax: Poetic Visions,’ presented by Hauser & Wirth Publishers in association with Zoe Brezsny, addresses this question by featuring poets who take risks through a wide variety of aesthetic approaches and performance styles. Their work bends genres at the crossroads of poetry, sound, and technology, operating as a tool of transformation.

Each event in the series features two poets; some are emerging creative forces, while others have had long careers yet continue to reinvent themselves. These pairings seek to juxtapose practices so that each reader might reveal something unexpected in the other’s work.

Cecilia Vicuña is a poet, conceptual artist, and activist. Will Alexander is a poet, essayist, and visual artist. These two renegade luminaries, who are long-time friends, will share with us their radiant interweaving. Vicuña’s rapturous songs about human rights, ecological preservation, and feminine politics will synergize Alexander’s longing “To imparadise the soul by humming butterfly dirges.” Alexander’s “Above the Human Nerve domain” will join with Vicuña’s “Ancient & Star-Flowered” to re- sensitize us, to tune us in to the world beneath the world, to the word under the word. Vicuña’s divinations, which arm us “with the visions of words,” will conspire with Alexander’s scientifically precise language, which is never cold and exacting, but rather lit with a spiritual and surreal incandescence.

Image: Byron Baker and Will Alexander