I am working on a mixed genre piece of writing that spans poetry, fiction, and non fiction. It is an attempt, but not really an attempt, to answer the title question. The book is set in Costa Rica and in Rome.

In the studio, I will be presenting the raw research material I’ve been collecting for this book. The book has two main characters and two main parts.

One character is looking towards nature:

After a death, hope is found in the town of Curridabat, Costa Rica, a town that has freshly given citizenship to its pollinators—birds, bees, trees. In the book, the hope inherent to this opening up of citizenship is brought to Rome, the city that had helped shaped the Western idea of what it is to be a citizen. The main relationship in this section is with the Tiber river and the book moves to poetry to reflect this intimacy. These poems explore the river as the first, and perhaps the last, citizen of Rome. In the studio you’ll see video of the river presented alongside a long stretch of graffiti, the basis for a long poem called, “What the River Reads”.

One character is looking toward people:

From Costa Rica, Fabiola has found herself in Rome doing interviews. With artists, with leather workers, with historians, geologists, and people on the street. Her interviewees respond to a single prompt. They are to define, however they like, something from her list of words: Ambiguity, Boredom, Compassion, Despair, Empathy, Fear, Guilt, etc. Sometimes the people interviewed speak on their expertise, sometimes they tell stories about their family.

As this dictionary of human existence takes shape, the question “How to Live Forever” is both answered and broken down. What is the use of forever? What is the use of separating people from nature? What should living mean?

In the studio, the list of words will be presented as a found poem. You will also see video of the interviews, culminating with geologist Alexander Alfano, who will perform live music inspired by the themes he presented in his interview.

Jacob Shores-Argüello is a Costa Rican American poet and prose writer. His latest book Paraíso was selected for the inaugural CantoMundo Poetry Prize. He is a 2018/019 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, a Lannan Literary Fellow for Poetry, and a current 2024-2025 Rome Prize winner in Literature. His work appears in The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, The Academy of American Poets, in The Oxford American, among others.