Book launch: The Tablets by Armand Schwerner.

Verge Books holds a celebration of the life and work of the poet Armand Schwerner at Poets House, marking a new volume of his selected poems and translations. Speakers including Michael Heller, Norman Finkelstein, Nicole Peyrafitte, Charles Bernstein, Ellen Zweig, Adam Schwerner, and Charlie Morrow offer tributes in music, film, and poetry. The centerpiece, The Tablets, is a work written over decades imagining a trove of Assyriological texts that explores translation, interpretation, and how language generates meaning, with the poet inhabiting a scholar-translator offering tentative, often contradictory readings in an ersatz archaeology both comic and spiritual. The volume also gathers a generous selection of Schwerner's translations and shorter poems.