I’ll be reading Wednesday night, May 22nd, at 7PM, upstairs at Fergie’s Pub, with Christopher Childers, who has just published his magisterial Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse, a project 14 years in the making. One night only, Mr. Childers will be in the city of Philadelphia to read from the anthology. It is a true pleasure and honor to bring him to Philadelphia to celebrate his new book.

Wednesday, May 22nd, 7PM
Fergie’s Pub
1214 Sansom Street
Philadelphia, PA 19107
215-928-8118
http://www.fergies.com/

Alicia Stallings (A. E. Stallings) wrote in the Telegraph newspaper about the new book: “[A]n inspired and enlightening lunacy … here is a work of staggering ambition, exceptional accomplishment, and surprisingly pleasant reading … The risk of a single translator rendering many poets might be a homogenising flatness, but Childers retunes his instrument for different effects, adding a string, slapping on a capo, going electric or harmonic. Perhaps most originally, Childers aims to get us to perceive connections across not only centuries and poets but languages. Different metrical patterns are associated with different subgenres or ‘vibes,’ and Childers is programmatic in his rendering of said patterns … Childers consistently, and sometimes brilliantly, turns out translations that also work as English poems … Childers’s elegant prose wears its learning lightly, and is often stealthily hilarious … The notes also point us to allusions to these poems or translations of them in the whole sweep of Anglophone poetry, and beyond, making this a relevant sourcebook for readers of Western poetry of any era … This book would make an excellent gift for anyone interested in classical literature: it practically amounts to a degree in classical literature in translation.”

Christopher Childers, author of The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse, a book 14 years in the making. He received an NEA Translators’ Fellowship in 2018, and has published in venues including The Kenyon Review, the Yale Review, Agni, Literary Matters, and Smartish Pace. His translations have been included in several anthologies, including The Penguin Book of Elegy and The Poetry Pharmacy Forever. His poem “Miasma” is forthcoming from Best American Poetry 2023.

Ernest Hilbert is the author of Sixty Sonnets, All of You on the Good Earth, Caligulan—selected as winner of the 2017 Poets’ Prize—Last One Out, and Storm Swimmer, selected by Rowan Ricardo Phillips as the winner of the 2022 Vassar Miller Prize. He lives in Philadelphia where he works as a rare book dealer.

Alina Macneal & Jennifer Hook will host. An open reading follows.