Poetry Reading with Idra Novey and Guests

Library Live at Labyrinth

Idra Novey, author of several novels, faces the complexities of life on a swiftly heating earth in her new poetry collection "Soon and Wholly." She is joined by Monica Youn and Ilya Kaminsky.

"Soon and Wholly" is on the longlist for the 2025 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection, which is awarded annually to a poet whose distinguished collection of poetry represents a notable and accomplished literary presence.

About the book (from the publisher):  "Soon and Wholly" brings a lyric intimacy to the extremes of our era. The poems juxtapose sweltering days raising children in a city with moments from a rural childhood roaming free in the woods, providing a bridge between those often polarized realities. Novey’s spare, contemporary fables move across the Americas, from a woman housesitting in central Chile, surrounded by encroaching fires, to a man in New York about to give birth to a panda.

Other poems return to the Allegheny Highlands of Appalachia, where Novey revisits the roads and creeks of her childhood: "Maybe we knew we only appeared/to be floating, but soon and wholly/we’d go under."

Like Lydia Davis and Anne Carson, Novey draws from the well of her work translating myriad authors, from Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector to Iranian poet Garous Abdolmalekian, and from her own award-winning novels. These are deeply lived poems, evoking both a singular life and the shared urgencies of our time, a collection of great inventiveness and wit, conjuring our "bit part in the history of the future."

Idra Novey is the author most recently of "Take What You Need," a New York Times Notable Book of 2023 and finalist for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and two other novels. Her second poetry collection "Exit, Civilian" was chosen by Patricia Smith for the National Poetry Series. She is the co-translator with Ahmad Nadalizadeh of Iranian poet Garous Abdolmalekian, "Lean Against This Late Hour," a finalist for the PEN America Poetry in Translation Prize in 2021. Her fiction and poetry have been translated into a dozen languages and she’s written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and The Guardian. She teaches creative writing at Princeton University. 

Monica Youn is the author of "From From" and three previous poetry collections: "Blackacre," a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, "Barter," and "Ignatz," a finalist for the National Book Award. The daughter of Korean immigrants and a former lawyer, she teaches at University of California, Irvine.

Ilya Kaminsky is the author of “Deaf Republic” and “Dancing In Odessa” and co-editor and co-translator of many other books. His work was a finalist for the National Book Award and has won the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the National Jewish Book Award, the Whiting Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, and Poetry magazine’s Levinson Prize. Kaminsky has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Fellowship, an Academy of American Poets’ Fellowship, and an NEA Fellowship. He currently teaches in Princeton and lives in New Jersey.

This event is cosponsored by Labyrinth Book, Princeton University’s Department of English, and Princeton’s Humanities Council.

Upcoming events