Triple Canopy is pleased to present an evening of readings with poets Gabriela Jauregui, Maxwell Paparella, and Mónica de la Torre.

It’s all ordinary stuff, poems, litanies, short prose pieces interrupted and rifled through by editorial and other voices. Fleetingness, transitoriness, emptiness, a general unease with respect to narrative and character, indeterminate scale and scope. Cosmetic surgery and so-called beautification practices seem apropos. Painting al fresco implies freshness, something raw, unfinished. And yet: There is hardening, irreversibility. We’re trying to figure out who eventually disposes of the impromptu roadside memorials.

Updates, or C’est la vie and those who say it is part of Triple Canopy’s forthcoming issue Vanitas, which takes its name from the opulent, hyperrealist still-life painting style of the mid-seventeenth century in the Netherlands—symbolizing the brevity of human life and the essential emptiness of earthly goods and pursuits. For this issue, Triple Canopy commissions artists, writers, and scholars to address contemporary conceptions of mortality as well as the delights, illusions, limits, and aesthetic pressures of fleshly existence, from the much-heralded “end of death” to extreme luxury and the pursuit of impossible (or near-impossible) forms of beauty. The futility of human striving meets the efficacy of the algorithm in contemporary culture, prompting us to ask: Is all still vanity?

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