March 9th: Anahid Nersessian in conversation with Zoe Kazan
Presented by 192 Books and Paula Cooper Gallery, Anahid Nersessian will discuss her new book Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse with Zoe Kazan.
The live event will stream directly on this page on Tuesday, March 9th at 6pm EST. There is no login or rsvp required. A recording will be posted shortly afterwards. During the broadcast, please email your questions to evan@192books.com.
Anahid Nersessian - Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse (University of Chicago Press, 2021)
“When I say this book is a love story, I mean it is about things that cannot be gotten over—like this world, and some of the people in it.”
In 1819, the poet John Keats wrote six poems that would become known as the Great Odes. Some of them—“Ode to a Nightingale,” “To Autumn”—are among the most celebrated poems in the English language. Here Anahid Nersessian collects and elucidates each of the odes and offers a meditative, personal essay in response to each, revealing why these poems still have so much to say to us, especially in a time of ongoing political crisis. Her Keats is an unflinching antagonist of modern life—of capitalism, of the British Empire, of the destruction of the planet—as well as a passionate idealist for whom every poem is a love poem.
The book emerges from Nersessian’s lifelong attachment to Keats’s poetry; but more, it “is a love story: between me and Keats, and not just Keats.” Drawing on experiences from her own life, Nersessian celebrates Keats even as she grieves him and counts her own losses—and Nersessian, like Keats, has a passionate awareness of the reality of human suffering, but also a willingness to explore the possibility that the world, at least, could still be saved. Intimate and speculative, this brilliant mix of the poetic and the personal will find its home among the numerous fans of Keats’s enduring work.
Anahid Nersessian is an associate professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Utopia, Limited: Romanticism and Adjustment, and The Calamity of Form: On Poetry and Social Life, and the coeditor of the Thinking Literature series, published by The University of Chicago Press.
Zoe Kazan is an actor and writer. She has acted off and on Broadway, and in TV and film, most recently in HBO’s “The Plot Against America.” She has written four produced plays, including Trudy and Max in Love and After The Blast. She wrote, acted in, and executive produced the 2012 film Ruby Sparks, and co-wrote and executive produced the 2018 film Wildlife. Born and raised in California, Zoe has resided in Brooklyn since 2007.