Monday, August 31, 2026 at 7:00 PM
Skylight Books, Los Angeles
Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry In Pyrrhic Symphony, the speaker asks, “Should a poem be the pill or the pharmacy?” And the book replies: Why not both? It ails and wails, blooms and wilts, but always breathes, just as anyone reading this does. Part siren songs, part torch songs, Pyrrhic Symphony sings wry lullabies for apocalypses public, personal, and politic, moving from cruise ships to Krakatoa, from a dentist’s office to a marriage as it explores how love, family, community, and art can function in the face of an increasingly hostile climate. And in lamenting how “all I ever wanted from love / was that it never change,” the feverish speaker goes toe-to-toe with the nurse who watches over him as they encounter and recount a world of late capitalist excess. By turns ecstatic and demonic, tender and terrifying, Pyrrhic Symphony stands as an act of musical witness and cautious hope in this age of corrupted wonder. Adam O. Davis is the author of Index of Haunted Houses, winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Poetry Prize. He is a recipient of the 2022 Poetry International Prize and the 2016 George Bogin Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. His work has appeared in AGNI, the Believer, the Kenyon Review, the Paris Review, ZYZZYVA, and in The Best American Poetry. Davis is cocreator and host of the podcast Poetry Goes to the Movies, and of its digital collection for the Poetry Foundation. Katie Ford is the author of four books of poems: Deposition; Colosseum; Blood Lyrics; and If You Have to Go, all published by Graywolf Press. Blood Lyrics was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and the Rilke Prize. Colosseum was named among the “Best Books of 2008” by Publishers Weekly and the Virginia Quarterly Review and led to a Lannan Literary Fellowship [http://www.lannan.org/literary/detail/katie-ford/poetry-award/]and the Larry Levis Prize. [http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v8n2/features/ford_k/intro_page.shtml] International invitations to read and lecture include festivals in Tunis, Morocco, Oslo, and Stockholm. She completed graduate work in world religions, theology and poetry at Harvard University, and, following that, received her M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Paris Review, The American Poetry Review, and the Norton Introduction to Literature.