Fragile Filters

Fiona Larkin and Kate Noakes explore the poet’s breath, its free flow, its disruptions and distresses, reading new and recently published poems focused on tuberculosis, asthma and other breathings.

Fiona Larkin will read from her recent pamphlet Vital Capacity (Broken Sleep, 2022), which looks at the world through the fragile filter of the lung. She will examine the myths and stigmas surrounding tuberculosis, the historical shame attached to acknowledging the disease and the political question of who can access medical treatment, within a broader recognition of the centrality of breath and its importance to poets. Kate Noakes’ in-progress manuscript, Sublime Lungs, concerns itself with her own chronic and lifelong asthma, as well as topics of breath and breathing across many chronologies and geographies. Her new pamphlet, Bird in an Air Pump, includes some of the poems.