September 2: Anne Waldman—Mesopotopia

Presented by 192 Books, Anne Waldman in conversation with Haleh Liza Gafori about Mesopotopia (Penguin Books, 2025)

This event will take place in person at 192 Books at 192 10th Ave on Tuesday, September 2nd at 7:00 PM ET. Seating is limited and will be first come, first served.

Books will be available for sale after the conversation.

Anne Waldman—Mesopotopia (Penguin Books, 2025)

From the cradle to the grave, from the mysterious poetic origins of Mesopotamia to our own dystopias of the 21st century, Anne Waldman crafts a singular, radical investigation into the syncretic layers of quantum space and dreamtime. Troubadour dawn songs, pyramid texts, Buddhist mantras, canonical hours of Judeo-Christian tradition, Persian prayers, Druid sorcery, and the wild, gnarly syntax and modal structure of Waldman’s particular performative passion and wit are all conjured here. What emerges is a meditation on the salient words of the French poet Antonin Artaud contemplating the destruction and rubble post–World War II: “We are not yet born, we are not yet in the world, there is not yet a world, things have not been made, the reason for being has not yet been found.” Mesopotopia—mythic maelstrom, rhythmic rite of passage, protolanguage trance dance—moves toward release and gnosis.

Photo by Nina Subin

Anne Waldman is based in New York City, and is the author of over sixty-five volumes of poetry, poetics, and anthologies including The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment (Coffee House Press), which won the PEN Center USA Award for Poetry. Her album Sciamachy was released in 2020 by Fast Speaking Music and has been described by Patti Smith as “exquisitely potent, a psychic shield for our times.” Waldman co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics program at Naropa University with Allen Ginsberg. A movie about her, Outrider, has been released this year by the Tamaas Foundation, with Martin Scorsese as executive producer.

Photo by Beowulf Sheehan

Haleh Liza Gafori's acclaimed translations of poetry by the 13th-century sage Rumi, Gold and Water, were published by New York Review Books. As a performance artist, Gafori weaves translations, original text, and musical compositions sung in Persian and English. Gafori is a 2024 MacDowell fellow, and the recipient of a 2023 New York State Council on the Arts grant. Her translations and her original writings have been published by various journals and presses including the Harvard Review, Columbia University Press, the Paris Review, the Brooklyn Rail, Literary Hub, and others.