Between Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens there a ton of readings happening every night. Each Sunday, Coldfront will feature five upcoming readings.

Kundiman & Verlaine present a night of poetry & libation

Sunday, May 6, 2012 ($5 suggested donation) Open Bar from 4-5 Reading begin at 5pm

A Celebration of PSA Chapbook-winning Kundiman fellows: Hossannah Asuncion, Alison Roh Park, & Angela Veronica Wong

Verlaine

10 Rivington St

New York, NY

KGB Season Finale

Monday, May 7, 2012  7:30pm- 12:00am

MATT HART is the author of four collections of poetry Who’s Who Vivid, Wolf Face, Light-Headed, and Sermons And Lectures Both Blank And Relentless, as well as several chapbooks. His poems, reviews, and essays have appeared in The Awl, Big Bell, Gulf Coast, jubilat, Ploughshares, and the Harvard Review, among others. A longtime musician, his current band is TRAVEL, and music from his previous projects has appeared on MTV and in major motion pictures, such as Kevin Smith’s Mallrats. The co-founder and editor-in-chief of Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking, & Light Industrial Safety, he lives in Cincinnati, OH and teaches writing and aesthetics at the Art Academy of Cincinnati.

MACGREGOR CARD is a poet, translator and bibliographer living in Jackson Heights, NYC. His first collection, Duties of an English Foreign Secretary, was the winner of the 2009 Fence Modern Poet Series. A new chapbook, The Archers, is newly released from Song Cave. With Andrew Maxwell he was co-editor of The Germ: A Journal of Poetic Research, from 1997-2005. He teaches poetry at Pratt Institute and is an associate editor of the MLA International Bibliography.

Kgb Bar

85 E 4th St, New York, NY

The Enpipe Line – NYC Book Launch

Tuesday, May 8, 2012   7:00-9:00pm

Originally conceived as a 1,170 kilometre-long collaborative line of poetry to match the length of the proposed Northern Gateway Pipelines, The Enpipe Line has grown to over 70,000 kilometres. This anthology, like the pipeline it opposes, outlines a dream. But, unlike Enbridge’s proposal, The Enpipe Line represents the shared desire of living community: that the proposed Enbridge pipelines project never sees the light of day. If built, these 1,170 kilometre pipelines will carry tar sands oil and its poisonous by-products across more than 700 streams and rivers between Alberta and the B.C. port of Kitimat. In Kitimat, crude oil would be pumped into supertankers for export, threatening the fragile coastal ecosystem with a major spill.

The NYC Book Launch features readings by contributors:
Emily Brandt
Alex Cuff
Michael Leong
Jonathan Skinner
Esther K Smith

Bluestockings Bookstore, Café, & Activist Center

172 Allen Street, New York

The Inspired Word

Wednesday, May 9, 2012 7:00pm ($10 cover charge) Open mike to follow

Hallie S. Hobson is a poet, playwright and Cave Canem Fellow. She has been featured at the LouderArts Project, Inspired Word and Bryant Park Reading Room reading series and has read commissioned works in conjunction with exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum and The Studio Museum in Harlem. Her theatrical works have been workshopped and presented at Brava! Theatre for Women in the Arts, Cornerstone Theater, the Mark Taper Forum Blacksmyths Writers’ Lab, and A.S.K. Theatre Projects, among other venues. She also works as a fundraiser supporting nonprofit cultural institutions such as The Museum of Modern Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and The House Foundation for the Arts. Hallie received her bachelor’s degree from Yale and an MFA in playwriting from UCLA and currently makes her home in Harlem.

Camille Rankine is the author of Slow Dance with Trip Wire, selected by Cornelius Eady for the Poetry Society of America’s 2010 New York Chapbook Fellowship. The recipient of a 2010 “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize, she was featured as an emerging poet in the fall 2010 issue of American Poet and the April 2011 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine. Her poetry has been published in several magazines and journals, including American Poet, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Indiana Review and POOL: A Journal of Poetry, and was commissioned by the New York Botanical Garden for their Literary Audio Tour. She received her BA from Harvard University, and her MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University. Camille serves on the Brooklyn Literary Council, acting as Co-Chair for the Brooklyn Book Festival Poetry Committee, and is Assistant Director of the Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Manahattanville College.

Nicole Sealey, an Afro-Latina poet who was born in St. Thomas, U.S.V.I., and raised in Central Florida, is a Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, and Squaw Valley alumna. Selected by D.A. Powell for inclusion in Best New Poets 2011 and a finalist for the 2011 Third Coast Poetry Prize, Nicole Sealey’s poems have appeared in the Harvard Review, Third Coast, and Callaloo, among others.

116 MacDougal Street
(between Bleecker Street and Minetta Lane)
Downstairs Lounge
Manhattan, NY

Wednesday May 9, 2012 8pm

The Poetry Project

A new cut of Kon Kon, (2012, 60 mins), will be screened, followed by a conversation between Cecilia Vicuña & Jonathan Skinner. In this documentary poem, poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña returns to Con Cón beach, the birthplace of her art in Chile, where the sea is dying and an ancient tradition is being wiped out. Con Cón, facing Aconcagua, the tallest mountain in the Western hemisphere, has a cultural heritage going back thousands of years. Over centuries, the “sonido rajado”, a powerful and unique sound, emerged. Revisiting the site, she explores the connections between her own art and the ancient music and oral traditions, while witnessing the ecological and cultural destruction of place.

Cecilia Vicuña’s works have for some forty years gravitated between the written word, in multiple languages and visual media, involving, “earth-works,” installation, a great deal of art made with thread and fabric, drawing and painting, printed works and book arts, film and video, and live intermedia performance. Among recent publications, she coedited The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry, surveying 500 years of multi-lingual work, presented in original languages with translations into English.

Jonathan Skinner’s poetry collections include Birds of Tifft (BlazeVOX, 2011) and Political Cactus Poems (Palm Press, 2005). He founded and edits the journal ecopoetics (www.ecopoetics.org), which features creative-critical intersections between writing and ecology. Currently a Fellow with the Cornell Society for the Humanities, Skinner also writes ecocriticism on contemporary poetry and poetics.

The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church

131 E. 10th Street

New York, NY

-steven karl