We’re open today from 11 AM—7 PM
Ensnaring The Moment: Book Reading with Leah Ollman & Rae Armantrout
November 7, 2025 at 6:00 pm
Axline Court
FREE with RSVP
This event is wheelchair accessible via our main entrance. ASL interpretation is available by request. For any specific accommodation, please e-mail info@mcasd.org.
The views expressed at this event belong solely to the artist(s) and do not necessarily represent the views of MCASD.
Join us for a book reading and signing with local author Leah Ollman to celebrate her new publication, Ensnaring the Moment: On the Intersection of Poetry and Photography. Ollman will be in conversation with renowned poet Rae Armantrout, professor emerita at UC San Diego.
This program is presented in conjunction with MCASD’s special exhibition, Alex Katz: Theatre and Dance. Like Katz’s paintings, the poems collected in Ensnaring the Moment explore transitory moments captured in word and image.
About Ensnaring the Moment: On the Intersection of Poetry and Photography
Ensnaring the Moment: On the Intersection of Poetry and Photography is an anthology of poems from the late 19th-century to the present that reckon with the staggering impact of photographs on our individual and collective consciousness. This first-of-its-kind collection features the work of over 100 poets, including Elizabeth Bishop, Victoria Chang, Lucille Clifton, Nikky Finney, Jack Gilbert, Terrance Hayes, Maxine Kumin, Philip Levine, Ada Limón, W. S. Merwin, Sharon Olds, Adrienne Rich, Wisława Szymborska, James Tate and Ocean Vuong. These poems expand the tradition of ekphrastic poetry, while also serving as unfettered acts of criticism and lyric forays into photo theory. Addressing family pictures, news images, found photographs and more, each poem offers a verbal portal to the visual, where the visual itself is a portal to the past, to an unrecognized facet of the familiar, to the other and to the self.
An introductory essay by Leah Ollman explores the affinities between photography and poetry, their common impulses to compress time, distill experience, mine memory, engage the fleeting moment and bear witness.
Program
5:45 PM: Doors Open
6PM: Introductions
6:05PM: Book Reading & Conversation with Leah Ollman and Rae Armantrout
6:45PM: Book Signing
About
Leah Ollman
Leah Ollman has been writing about art for more than 35 years. Her reviews and features have appeared regularly in the Los Angeles Times and Art in America, as well as in Photograph, The Brooklyn Rail, Paris Review Daily, Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles (CARLA), ARTnews, American Craft, and many other publications. She has written essays for books on William Kentridge, Alison Rossiter, Julie Blackmon, Michael Light, Chris McCaw, Klea McKenna, Michal Chelbin and others, and contributed to numerous exhibition catalogues. Since 2018, she has served annually as a judge for the James Beard Awards. She earned her M.A. in Art History from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Scripps College. Her book, Ensnaring the Moment: On the Intersection of Poetry and Photography, was released by Saint Lucy Books in 2025.
Rae Armantrout
Rae Armantrout has published seventeen books of poetry. Her most recent is Go Figure published by Wesleyan University Press in 2014. Her 2018 book Wobble was a finalist for the National Book Award. In 2010 Versed won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Armantrout is a professor emerita at UCSD. Her poems have appeared in journals such as The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Bomb, Granta, and Poetry Magazine.
Related Exhibitions
On view