You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake

A sharp-witted investigation of love, work, and human responsibility in the age of consumption and hyperexposure.

In a world where we find “everything helping itself / to everything else,” Anna Moschovakis incorporates Craigslist ads, technobabble, twentieth-century ethics texts, scientific research, autobiographical detail, and historical anecdote to present an engaging lyric analysis of the way we live now. “It’s your life,” she tells the reader, “and we have come to celebrate it.”

Publication date: February 18, 2011

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 6 x 9

Page count: 132 pages

ISBN: 9781566892506

Anna Moschovakis is the author of You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake, winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone, a finalist for the Norma Farber First Book Award and a selection of the Poetry Society of America’s New American Poetry Series. Her translations from the French include texts by Robert Bresson, Annie Ernaux, Samira Negrouche, Marcelle Sauvageot, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Albert Cossery. She teaches in the MFA programs at Pratt Institute and Bard College and was the 2016 Holloway Lecturer in the Practice of Poetry at UC Berkeley. Raised in Los Angeles, Moschovakis has lived in New York since 1993 and is currently based in the northern Catskills, where she is active in a nonprofit art and community space called Bushel in Delhi, New York. She is also a longtime member of the Brooklyn-based publishing collective Ugly Duckling Presse.

Winner of the 2011 James Laughlin Award

A Coldfront Top 30 Poetry Book of 2011

“Anna Moschovakis boldly writes as though Plato had never kicked poets out of the Republic. . . . Beneath their controlled and imperturbable surfaces, her poems perform the painful experience of the complicity with injustice that comes with citizenship. . . . But this ambitious and compassionate book also believes—or hopes—that mindful attention to language might happily lead us elsewhere, toward other economies, other ways of being here together.”

—Brian Teare, The Academy of American Poets 2011 James Laughlin Award Citation

“Easy-on-the-ear, accessible, wise, and funny. . . . [Moschovakis] takes on the big questions by way of unusual details.”

—Bookforum

“Moschovakis shows us how it feels to want answers to certain kinds of questions, to see processes and seek causalities, and then get stuck in hermeneutic circles instead. . . . Mysterious, haunted, terse.” 

—Stephen Burt, The Nation

“With You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake, Anna Moschovakis establishes herself as the T.S. Eliot of the Internet generation.” 

—H_NGM_N

“[T]he pleasure to be found in Moschovakis’s poetry [is] the way she theorizes and reflects on the seemingly immeasurable movements of our broken era. In her books, poetry is enacted as a living, compassionate and dynamic process.”

—Galatea Resurrects