FREE TRIALS #3 is the third in a new monthly series of events engaging with the MayDay Rooms radical poetry archival collection. Each event will begin with us collectively pulling out the radical poetry archive, reading and scanning these materials together from 6-7pm. Between 7-9pm there will be poetry readings from the archive, before we hand over to two contemporary poets; Lila Matsumoto and Sarah Riggs.

The radical poetry archival collection at MayDay Rooms features historical and contemporary dissident, heretical, non-conformist and revolutionary poetries, and the scanning and reading series is an invitation for us to regularly congregate, so that we may engage, discuss, and proliferate these texts.

This event is hosted by Danny Hayward, Lizzie Homersham, Luke Roberts, Aurelia Guo and Rowan Powell.

Feel free to join for scanning, or reading, or both.

Lila Matsumoto’s poetry publications are Talk a Blue Streak (Monitor Books, 2026), Two Twin Pipes Sprout Water (Prototype, 2021), and Urn & Drum (Shearsman, 2018). Other publications include the poem poster ‘Roasted by myself’ (Prototype, 2025) and a creative-critical book on cross-disciplinary art practice, The Very Nature of Materiality is an Entanglement, produced in collaboration with OK-RM design studio (In Other Words, 2024). She plays in the bands Food People and Mountain Hovel Circle, and teaches Creative Writing at the University of Nottingham.

Sarah Riggs is a poet and artist based in Brooklyn. She received the 1913 Poetry Prize for her book Pomme & Granite and her translation of Etel Adnan’s Time won the Griffin International Prize and Best Translated Book Award. Word Sightings, her essays on the impact of visual media on US poetry, was published by Routledge. With her partner Omar Berrada, Riggs runs Tamaas, an intercultural arts organization focusing on translation, film and education, and co-edited Another Room to Live In: 15 Contemporary Arab Poets (Litmus). Written during the 2016-20 Trump presidency, along with The Nerve Epistle (Roof), Lines is her eighth book of poems.