Poet Jane Hirshfield will be at Readers' Books on Wednesday, September 20th at 6 p.m. to read from The Asking. This collection begins with new and urgent poems, then returns to the beginning of her career, tracing her continuing drive to draw attention to beauty and injustice equally. From poems of the smallest ant and the vastness of time, to ones of hunger and bounty, Hirshfield faces the contradictions that have shaped her work. As she faces the depredations of climate and the harm humans cause to their own kind, she also interrogates poetry itself as a vibrant, living medium. A leading advocate for the biosphere and the alliance of science with  imagination, she brings an abiding compass: the choice to embrace what is and face whatever comes with courage, curiosity, and a sense of kinship.

Jane Hirshfield is the author of ten collections of poetry and two now-classic collections of essays on poetry’s deep workings, and the editor of four co-translated books presenting world poets from the deep past. Hirshfield is one of American poetry’s central spokespersons for concerns about the biosphere and interconnection. Her honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations and from the Academy of American Poets; the Poetry Center Book Award and the California Book Award; her books have been long- and finalist-listed for the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and England’s T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. Her work, translated into seventeen languages, appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and ten editions of The Best American Poetry. A former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2019.