A Field of Stillness and Fire

The future is not a distant horizon—it is a pressure, a question, a making. In this featured reading, Robert Hass and Tongo Eisen-Martin bring their distinct poetics into shared air. Hass writes from a practice of attention—where the natural world, memory, and language gather to ask how we might live with care inside what is vanishing and what remains. Eisen-Martin's work strikes at the conditions that structure the present, his lines charged with refusal, insurgency, and the demand for otherwise. Between them, a field emerges: stillness and upheaval, observation and fire. The poems do not resolve the future—they trouble it, press against it, insist on it. Here, poetry becomes a site of reckoning and reimagining, where what comes next is not given, but made. This event took place in Downtown Berkeley, at the Bay Area Book Festival, May 29-31 2026.  Support our work and help to keep the Bay Area Book Festival 96% free! https://givebutter.com/writingthefuture Check out our upcoming events www.baybookfest.org Follow us on instagram: https://www.instagram.com/baybookfest/