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Fantasy Reading Series No. 8

This month will feature Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy reading their translations of Rilke.

Anita Barrows has won numerous national awards for her poetry, including a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Quarterly Review Award, and a Riverstone Press Award. Her work has appeared in the Nation, Prairie Schooner, Bridges, and many other journals. She is also a translator from French, Italian, and German; her most recent translations (with Joanna Macy) have been three volumes of the poetry and prose of Rainer Maria Rilke.

Joanna Macy is a scholar of Buddhism, general systems theory, and deep ecology. A respected voice in the movements for peace, justice, and ecology, she interweaves her scholarship with five decades of activism. As the root teacher of the Work That Reconnects, she has created a ground-breaking theoretical framework for personal and social change, as well as a powerful workshop methodology for its application. Her wide-ranging work addresses psychological and spiritual issues of the nuclear age, the cultivation of ecological awareness, and the fruitful resonance between Buddhist thought and contemporary science.

Rainer Maria Rilke was a Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist, known for his writing in both verse and highly lyrical prose. Several critics have described Rilke's work as "mystical". His writings include one novel, several collections of poetry, and several volumes of correspondence in which he invokes haunting images that focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety.