Catherine Barnett with Hilda Davis

Catherine Barnett reads from her newly released collection Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space. She'll be joined in conversation by her former student, doula and writer Hilda Davis. The loneliness that collects in mirrors and faces—at bedside vigils and in city streets—quickens Catherine Barnett’s metaphysical poems, which are like speculative prescriptions for this common human experience. Here loneliness is filled with belonging, which is in turn filled with loneliness, each state suffused and emptied by the other. Barnett’s fourth collection is part manifesto, part how-to manual, part apologia: a guide to the homeopathic dangers and healing powers of an emotion so charged with eros, humor, and elusive beauty it becomes a companion both desired and eschewed, necessary and illuminating. Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space is never far from grief or a comedy of bewilderment, inadequacy, hope. Entering Barnett’s world is a little like entering an electrically charged cloud, and the prospect of either falling or getting caught in a storm brings vertiginous and unpredictable pleasures. Bristling with uncanny intelligence, the poems are sometimes quiet elegies, sometimes meditations on art, love, and the failures of love that so often define love. Barnett might be called a realist—her style is radiantly exact—yet somehow she is a guide both into and out of the existential void. She has written a tender, dazzling collection of estrangement and intimacy. Catherine Barnett is the author of four poetry collections, including Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space (2024 Graywolf); Human Hours (Believer Book Award, New York Times "Best Poetry of 2018" selection); The Game of Boxes (James Laughlin Award); and Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced (Beatrice Hawley Award). A Guggenheim fellow, she received a 2022 Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among other recognitions. Her work has been published in the New Yorker, The NY Review of Books, The Yale Review, The Nation, Harper’s, and elsewhere. She teaches in NYU's MFA Program and works as an independent editor. Hílda Davis is a first-generation Black Costa Rican American from Staten Island, NY. A graduate of the University at Albany and Indiana University, she has an MFA in poetry from NYU and is currently pursuing an MSW at the University of Washington. As a birth and postpartum doula, she serves community members here in Seattle, where she lives with her spouse and two children. As an artist, her work focuses on girlhood, survival, and those she loves, past and present.

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