Into the Reach of Language: A Rail Reading curated by Alice Attie

Maureen N. McLane is a poet, memoirist, critic, and educator. She has published eight books of poetry, including This Blue, Finalist for the National Book Award. She is also the author of an experimental hybrid of memoir and criticism, My Poets, a New York Times Notable Book and Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography. Other works include two monographs on British romantic poetics and numerous essays on romantic-era and contemporary literature and culture. Her poems have been translated into Italian, French, Greek, Spanish, and Czech. She is the Henry James Professor of English and American Letters at New York University. Her latest book is What You Want: Poems, just out from FSG and Penguin UK.

Gideon Kahn is a writer, blues musician, and educator. His writing, fantastical at heart, currently centers the liberation of childishness in grown-up worlds. Gideon hails from New York City, where he lives with his wife and baby boy.

Naveen Kishore is a lighting designer, photographer, poet, and publisher. He founded Seagull Books in 1982.

Visual artist and poet Alice Attie received an MFA in Poetry under the tutelage of June Jordon, and completed a Ph.D. in Comparative literature. Attie’s writing addresses the challenge within the meeting place of language and the unspeakable: how we accommodate loss, how we speak about what is inaccessible to language. The tenuous distinction between writing and drawing has always been a fascination for Attie. Alice Attie’s visual work has been shown in many collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, The Jewish Museum, The Getty, and The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. Attie’s two previous books of poems, These Figures Lining the Hills and Under the Aleppo Sun, were published by Seagull Books.