The Universe in Verse was born in 2017 as a charitable festival of wonder: stories from the history of science — the history of our search for truth and our yearning to know nature — told live onstage and illustrated with poems — those emblems of our search for meaning and our yearning to know ourselves — read by beloved artists, writers, and musicians. Year after year, thousands of people gathered to listen, think, and feel together — a congregation of creatures concerned with the relationship between truth and beauty, between love and mortality, between the finite and the infinite.

The show is now a book. To celebrate its birth, I bring together a small constellation of luminaries — including poet Marie Howe, musician David Byrne, Radiolab creator Jad Abumrad, cosmologist and saxophonist Stephon Alexander, artists Helga Davis and Debbie Millman, composer and National Sawdust founder Paola Prestini, and actor Lili Taylor (who narrates the audiobook) — for an evening of science and poetry exploring dark matter and radioactivity, fungi and pi, octopus intelligence and the evolution of flowers. There will be music and there will be magic. Join us.

DATE: October 4, 2024
TIME: doors 6PM, show 7PM
LOCATION: National Sawdust, 80 N 6th Street, Brooklyn, NY

>>> TICKETS

Peek inside the book here.