Acclaimed poet and New Yorker writer Cynthia Zarin shares musings on Venice from her latest book, a deeply personal meditation on two cities, Venice and Rome—each a work of art, both a monument to the past—and on how love and loss shape places and spaces.

Here we encounter a writer deeply engaged with narrative in situ—a traveler moving through beloved streets, sometimes accompanied, sometimes solo. With her, we see, anew, the Venice Biennale, the Lagoon, and San Michele, the island of the dead; and the pigeons at San Marco. As a poet first and foremost, Zarin’s attention to the smallest details, the loveliest gesture, brings Venice vividly to life for the reader.

The sixteenth book in the expanding, renowned ekphrasis series published by David Zwirner Books, Two Cities creates space for these two historic cities to become characters themselves, their relationship to the writer as real as any love affair.