Catastrophe to Courage: Poets Push the Essay

What drives a poet all the way across a page? What pushes a poet to run up that flight onto the more public platform of prose? What if a poet rents a room in the essay and scrawls midnight poems across its walls? Come see how five poets––Ching-In Chen, Jennifer Firestone, Muriel Leung, Dana Teen Lomax, and Sarah Rosenthal––mess with the essay form in order to investigate catastrophe spliced with courage, love, and inexplicable flashes of beauty.