Meet Me There: Featuring Poets Daisy Atterbury and Farid Matuk

From the venue:

This event takes place on crowdcast, Charis' virtual event platform. Register here.

"Meet Me There" is a monthly intergenerational poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction experience curated by trans/genderqueer poet and sound artist Samuel Ace. Writers exploring genre and gender boundaries will be a special focus of this series. This event usually takes place on the second Thursday of each month at 7:30pm ET. Some months our readings will take place at Charis Books with an option to watch virtually, and some months the event will be fully virtual, so be sure to check the listing! 

March's featured poets are Daisy Atterbury and Farid Matuk in celebration of their collections, The Kármán Line and Moon Mirrored Indivisible.

Featured Poet

DAISY ATTERBURY is a poet, essayist and scholar. The Kármán Line (2024), a St. Lawrence Book Award Finalist and debut book of experimental prose and poetry, was published in October 2024 with Rescue Press. Described as "a new cosmology" (Lucy Lippard) and "a cerebral altar to the desert" (Raquel Gutiérrez), The Kármán Line investigates queer life and fantasies of space and place with an interest in unraveling colonial narratives in the American Southwest. Atterbury holds a full-time lectureship in the Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program and Department of American Studies at the University of New Mexico and recently curated the Living Room Series for Poetry at the Center for Contemporary Arts, Santa Fe

The Kármán line describes the altitude at which outer space begins and national airspace ends, where the body in flight achieves orbit. In The Kármán Line, a heartsick narrator drives across the Jornada del Muerto to the commercial rocket launch site Spaceport America. Tracing back from outer space to the American Southwest, their account glides between off-planet simulations, uranium mining, queer erotics, military rockets, galactic zones of avoidance, and settler logics to arrive in the “outside of outside.” In Daisy Atterbury’s hybrid epic, colonial histories and speculative futures coalesce into hope for a shared present.

Featured Poet

FARID MATUK is the author of the poetry collections This Isa Nice Neighborhood, The Real Horse, and Moon Mirrored Indivisible. With visual artist Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez, Matuk created the book-arts project Redolent, recipient of the 2023 Anna Rabinowitz Prize from the Poetry Society of America. Matuk’s work has been supported by residencies from the Headlands Center for the Arts, a visiting Holloway Lectureship in the Practice of Poetry at the University of California, Berkeley, and a 2024 USA Fellowship from United States Artists.

A previously undocumented child of Syrian and Peruvian parents, an inheritor of lineages marked by colonial and gendered violence, and a survivor of childhood sexual assault, Farid Matuk approaches the musical capacities of verse not as mere excitation or decoration, but as forms that reclaim pleasure and presence. Entering the sonic constellations of Moon Mirrored Indivisible, the reader finds relief from nesting layers of containment that systems of power impose on our bodies and imaginations. In this hall of historical mirrors, fictions of identity are refracted, reflected, and multiplied into a vast field of possibilities. Matuk’s meditations on place and power offer experiments in self-understanding, moving through expansive conversations between a lyric “I” and others, including poets, the speaker’s partner, ancestors, and the reader, and creating spaces for strange intimacy. Each of the book’s four sections of poems builds on the other to ask how we might form a collective—a people—not founded in orthodoxies of originality but in the mutual work of mirroring one another.

Host Poet

Samuel Ace is a trans/genderqueer writer and sound artist. His latest books are I want to start by saying (Cleveland State University Poetry Center 2024), Our Weather Our Sea (Black Radish 2019), and Meet Me There: Normal Sex & Home in three days. Don’t wash. (Belladonna* 2019). Ace is the recipient of the Astraea Lesbian Writer Award and the Firecracker Alternative Book Award in Poetry, as well as a repeat finalist for both the Lambda Literary Award and the National Poetry Series. Recent work can be found in Personal Best: Makers on Their Poems that Matter Most, Essential Queer Voices of U.S. Poetry, Fence, BathHouse, The Texas Review, Poetry, We Want it All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetry, Best American Experimental Poetry, and many other journals and anthologies. 

The event is free and open to all people, but we encourage and appreciate a donation of $5-20 in support of the work of Charis Circle, our programming non-profit. Donate on crowdcast or via our website: www.chariscircle.org/donate

Please contact us at info@chariscircle.org or 404-524-0304 if you would like ASL interpretation at this event. If you would like to watch the event with live AI captions, you may do so by watching it in Google Chrome and enabling captions: Instructions here. If you have other accessibility needs or if you are someone who has skills in making digital events more accessible please don't hesitate to reach out to info@chariscircle.org. We are actively learning the best practices for this technology and we welcome your feedback as we begin this new way of connecting across distances.

By attending our virtual event you agree to our Code of Conduct: Our event seeks to provide a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, age, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, religion (or lack thereof), class, or technology choices. We do not tolerate harassment in any form. Unsolicited sexual language and imagery are not appropriate. Anyone violating these rules will be expelled from this event and all future events at the discretion of the organizers. Please report all harassment to info@chariscircle.org immediately.