“This year’s Deep Water Literary Festival launches with an exploration of transformation—where poetry becomes music, grief becomes art, and memory becomes a bridge between worlds. Experience the luminous poetry of Marie Howe (New York Poet Laureate 2012-2016) reimagined as song in this special collaborative performance. Composer Ricky Ian Gordon—whose music has been hailed as ‘caviar for a world gorging on pizza’ (The New York Times)—transforms Howe’s verses, written in the wake of her brother’s death, into soaring vocal songs. Soprano Jennifer Zetlan, praised as “a tour de force” (The Wall Street Journal), brings these librettos to life with her radiant voice, interwoven with readings by Marie Howe of her Pulitzer Prize-winning poems.

The evening culminates with Grammy-winning pianist Kevin Hays’ improvisatory riff on Philip Glass’s Metamorphosis.”