Book Launch for The Age of Loneliness

A reading to celebrate the launch of The Age of Loneliness, essays by Laura Marris. With poet and visual artist Summer J. Hart and emceed by Noah Falck.

In this debut essay collection, Laura Marris reframes environmental degradation by setting aside the conventional, catastrophic framework of the Anthropocene in favor of that of the Eremocene, the age of loneliness, marked by the dramatic thinning of wildlife populations and by isolation between and among species. She asks: how do we add to archives of ecological memory? How can we notice and document what’s missing in the landscapes closest to us?

Filled with equal parts alienation and wonder, each essay immerses readers in a different strange landscape of the Eremocene. Among them are the Buffalo airport with its snowy owls and the purgatories of commuter flights, layovers, and long-distance relationships; a life-size model city built solely for self-driving cars; the coasts of New England and the ever-evolving relationship between humans and horseshoe crabs; and the Connecticut woods Marris revisits for the first time after her father’s death, where she participates in the annual Christmas Bird Count and encounters presence and absence in turn.

Vivid, keenly observed, and driven by a lively and lyrical voice, The Age of Loneliness is a moving examination of the dangers of loneliness, the surprising histories of ecological loss, and the ways that community science—which relies on the embodied evidence of “ground truth”—can help us recognize, and maybe even recover, what we’ve learned to live without.

About the Poets & Writers

Laura Marris is a writer and translator. Her writing has appeared in The Believer, The Yale Review, The Paris Review Daily, The Common, The TLS, The New York Times, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. Her work has been supported by fellowships from MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and a grant from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation. Her first solo-authored book, The Age of Loneliness, is forthcoming from Graywolf in August 2024. She teaches creative writing at the University at Buffalo and is a teaching artist at Just Buffalo Literary Center.

Summer J. Hart is an interdisciplinary artist and writer from Maine living in the Hudson Valley, New York. She is the author of Boomhouse (2023, The 3rd Thing Press), winner of the 2024 Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize. Her creative work has been supported by NYSCA/NYFA and MacDowell fellowships. Her poetry can be found in Best Small Fictions 2023, Denver Quarterly, Heavy Feather Review, The Massachusetts Review, Northern New England Review, Waxwing, and elsewhere. Summer is an enrolled member of the Listuguj Mi’gmaq First Nation.

Noah Falck is a poet and culture worker. He is the author of the poetry collections Exclusions (Finalist for the 2020 Believer Book Award) and Snowmen Losing Weight as well as several chapbook collections and the collaboration, Prerecorded Weather (Winner of the James Tate Poetry Prize). In 2013, he founded the Silo City Reading Series, a multimedia poetry event series inside a 120-foot high, 100-year-old abandoned grain elevator. He is the Literary Director at Just Buffalo.