On the eve of the 2026 Midterm Elections, the Poetry Room invites you to come together for a reading by two of the most fearless, visionary, and uncompromising poets writing in America today, Ariana Reines and Eileen Myles—who, in 1992, ran for President as a write-in candidate.

Together, Myles and Reines will offer a night of unruliness, resilience, tenderness, ferocity, and possibility. This not-to-missed evening will be introduced by K. Prevallet, who will provide an invocation.

In-Person Attendance: Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts auditorium,
24 Quincy Street, Cambridge, Mass. Free and open to the public. 
  

Online Attendance: Livestreaming available via the WPR YouTube Channel. 

Myles will read from Bird Watching and Their First Three Books of Poetry (Fonograf, 2026),  a dynamic new volume gathering a never-before-published long poem, circa 1978, with the three books that launched their poetic life. Restless, intimate, raw, and wildly attentive, these early poems already signal the emergence of one of the defining forces in American poetry.

Reines will read from The Rose (Graywolf, 2025) and other new work. Moving between erotic desire and spiritual longing, violence and tenderness, The Rose is a book of bodies—historical, mythical, intimate, political—and of the elemental forces that move through them.

This reading will mark the 2nd Annual Fanny Howe Memorial Reading.