William Pierce and Sumita Chakraborty read from Reality Hunger: On Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle and Soundings: On the Poetry of Melissa Green

Harvard Book Store welcomes AGNI‘s senior editor William Pierce and assistant poetry editor Sumita Charkaborty for a discussion of their books, Reality Hunger: On Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, and Soundings: On the Poetry of Melissa Green.

Reality Hunger and Soundings were printed right here at Harvard Book Store on Paige, our print-on-demand book machine.

Praise for Reality Hunger:

“William Pierce’s long essay about Karl Ove Knausgaard is remarkable—it is searching, very intelligent, compellingly readable, and offers insights into Knausgaard’s work that no other commentator has yet achieved, or dared. It also displays, as if in homage, a very Knausgaardian virtue: a kind of systematic, relentless patience that is fundamentally philosophical in nature. I learned a great deal from it.” —James Wood

About Soundings:

Twenty poets, fiction writers, visual artists, musicians, editors, and scholars gather here to provide an overview and to engage in a celebration of Melissa Green, a poet from Winthrop, Massachusetts and a woman who epitomizes the word “survivor.” Green has received prizes from the Academy of American Poets and the Poetry Society of America, and has written multiple volumes of poetry and two memoirs. The contributors of Soundings: On the Poetry of Melissa Green include J. Mae Barizo, Sven Birkerts, Malachi Black, Sumita Chakraborty, Anna Schuleit Haber, Cynthia Haven, Chloe Honum, Major Jackson, George Kalogeris, Karl Kirchwey, Melissa Kwasny, Dana Levin, Askold Melnyczuk, Carol Moldaw, Joyce Peseroff, William Pierce, Steven Ratiner, David Rivard, Rosanna Warren, and Phillip B. Williams. Soundings also contains a previously unpublished poem by Green.

Soundings includes key writings about Green from recent publications as well as a wealth of new perspectives on her work and life. With responses that range from a sonnet to prose poems to literary criticism to personal reflections to an interview, the collection is, fittingly, also a celebration of poetry itself. Tom Sleigh once described Green’s work as “the very definition of what Hopkins once celebrated as the ‘achieve of; the mastery of the thing.'” As a festschrift comprised of responses that span critical and artistic genres, Soundings for the first time allows readers to explore Green’s extraordinary achievement, mastery, and life.