Please join us to celebrate the launch of The Banquet by Stav Poleg. The reading will be hosted by Leo Boix. The event will feature readings and discussion, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. We will show the text during readings so that you can read along.

Registration for this online event will cost £2, redeemable against the cost of the book. You will receive the discount code and instructions for how to purchase the book in your confirmation email as well as during and after the event.

Register here https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ilMBiwaNRk2daJ2qBZ7DCg#/registration and let us know you can make it by joining and sharing the Facebook listing https://www.facebook.com/events/757255913613606/

‘In the story, a metropolis took off like a dark-flying

machine—a ship floating on air—the bridges opened

and stretched, letting go of the river, waving

silver-dark wings. In the story, a stone

fell from the sky like a closing-in

fear—leaving a hole on the path heading

towards the sea. There’s a note

I’ve been drawing and throwing away

like an unsettled sketch—in a different country

a girl is always still running, crossing / a field.’

The Banquet explores the fragile, intricate links between language and longing —how words can reconstruct great cities out of memories and dreams, tear them apart, or carry them from one place to another, as if each city, house and chamber were made of sonic and visual images rather than walls and bricks. Moving between the worlds of philosophy, theatre and poetry—from Dante’s Florence to Wittgenstein’s Cambridge; from Tom Stoppard’s theatre stage to the harsh landscapes of Rimbaud’s poetry—The Banquet explores the ever-growing tensions between words and action, knowledge and ethics.

About the speakers:

Stav Poleg‘s debut poetry collection, The City (Carcanet, 2022) was chosen for the Financial Times‘ Best Summer Books 2022, and was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Poetry Prize for a First Collection, 2023. Her poetry has appeared on both sides of the Atlantic, in The New Yorker, Kenyon Review, Poetry Daily, Poetry London, Poetry Ireland Review, PN Review and elsewhere. A selection of her work is featured in New Poetries VIII (Carcanet, 2021). Her graphic-novel installation, ‘Dear Penelope: Variations on an August Morning’, created with artist Laura Gressani, was acquired by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Her theatre work was read at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, and the Shunt Vaults, London, and most recently at Kettle’s Yard gallery, Cambridge. She serves on the editorial board of Magma Poetry magazine and teaches for the Poetry School on a range of subjects including poetry inspired by the Divine Comedy, the Odyssey and the cinema of Fellini. She lives in Cambridge, UK.

Leo Boix is a bilingual Latinx poet, born in Argentina and based in London. His debut collection, Ballad of a Happy Immigrant (Chatto & Windus, 2021), won the Poetry Book Society Wild Card Choice and was named one of The Guardian’s top five poetry books of the year. His second collection, Southernmost: Sonnets (Chatto & Windus, 2025), is currently shortlisted for the Forward Prizes for Poetry in the Best Collection category. Boix is the editor and translator of the groundbreaking Hemisferio Cuir: An Anthology of Young Queer Latin American Poetry (Fourteen Poems) and has championed Latin American poets in English. His work appears in leading journals and anthologies, including POETRY, The Poetry Review, Poetry London, 100 Queer Poems, and The Forward Book of Poetry. A Complete Works fellow, he co-directs Un Nuevo Sol, supporting UK Latinx writers, and serves on the Poetry Translation Centre and Magma boards. His poetry has been commissioned by the Tate Modern, the Royal Kew Gardens, and others. His awards include the Bart Wolffe Prize, Keats-Shelley Prize, and a PEN Award.