“This end-times opera drags our terror into the light where it might actually save us.” –Bill Roorbach, on Persephone in the Late Anthropocene
Megan Grumbling’s poetry collection Persephone in the Late Anthropocene vaults an ancient myth into the age of climate crisis. It began life as an experimental opera, co-created with composer Denis Nye and produced by Hinge/Works. Now, its launch as a book will be a virtual, multi-media experiment of a reading.
In Persephone in the Late Anthropocene, the goddess comes and goes erratically from our warming world, drinks too much, and takes a human lover, as a Chorus of humans looks on and enables her. Through lyric verse, magical-realist prose poems, and speculative crypto-studies of the Anthropocene, this ecopoetic collection explores both environmental crisis and the nature of story itself. Along with a live reading by the author, the Persephone Virtual Launch will feature a digital Greek Chorus, crypto-documentary film interludes, and music recordings from Persephone’s original score, by composer Denis Nye.
Co-hosted by the SPACE and made possible with the support of the Maine Arts Commission, the Persephone launch will feature the work of director Tess Van Horn; actors Catherine Buxton, Nolan Ellsworth, and Deborah Paley; filmmakers David Camlin and Amy Grumbling; musical director Aaron Pettengill, and musicians Volkhard Lindner, Benjamin Meiklejohn, Leigh-Ashley Milne, and Sam Schuth.
To RSVP for this event and receive a Zoom link, please visit SPACE.
Megan Grumbling’s poetry collection Booker’s Point received the Vassar Miller Prize and the Maine Literary Award for Poetry, and her work has been awarded the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Fellowship, the Robert Frost Foundation Award, and a Hawthornden Castle Fellowship in Scotland. She teaches at Southern Maine Community College and the University of New England, and lives and writes in Portland.