Friday Oct 23, 2026
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
POWERHOUSE Arena
28 Adams Street (Corner of Adams & Water Street across from the Archway)
Brooklyn , NY
11201
About the Book.
Winner of the 2025 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award, Arguments is an innovative collection that explores inner conflict, ethical action and the eroding ties between self, family, community and the land.
In “Anima Hominis,” Yeats writes, “We make out of our quarrels with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” Arguments by Benjamin Gucciardi takes that inner quarrel as its starting point. Written in a time of environmental collapse and social unrest, these poems confront the contradictions that shape contemporary life: how to make a self, a family and an ethical life within exploitative systems that demand complicity. Moving through domestic spaces, a climate activist camp, and landscapes of the American West, the collection blends lyric and formal poems to ask urgent questions: What responsibilities to we bear to one another? How are we entangled in the systems we seek to dismantle? What place does violent resistance hold? How do we sustain an inner life in a material-driven world―and how, in the face of grief, do we balance private mourning with collective obligation? Arguments turns to language as a practice of care, tending the fragile links between self and community, human and non-human, the living and the dead.
About the Author.
Originally from San Francisco, Benjamin Gucciardi is the author of Arguments (Persea Books, 2026) winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award and West Portal (University of Utah Press, 2021), winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry. His poems appear in American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry Magazine, On Being’s Poetry Unbound, and elsewhere.