Posts Tagged ‘Amy King’

This Week in NYC: Featured Readings

Sunday, May 5th, 2013

Sundays, Coldfront features five upcoming cross-borough readings in NYC. Check out this week’s picks.
 
 
 
 
 
 

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Monday, May 6 @ 6:00-7:30 p.m.
Poetry Reading with Four Way Books Poets
NYU Bookstore, 726 Broadway, New York, NY

Alex DimitrovYona HarveyAllison Benis WhiteBruce Willard and Jay Baron

 

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Monday Night Poetry: LOUIS JENKINS + GLYN MAXWELL
Monday, May 6 @ 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm
KGB Bar, 85 E. 4th St, New York, NY

LOUIS JENKINS is the author of Before You Know It: Prose Poems 1970-2005. Other books include An Almost Human Gesture (Eighties Press and Ally Press, 1987), All Tangled Up With the Living (Nineties Press, 1991), Nice Fish: New and Selected Prose Poems (Holy Cow! Press, 1995), winner of the Minnesota Book Award, Just Above Water (Holy Cow! Press, 1997) and The Winter Road (Holy Cow! Press, 2000). One of the American masters of the prose poem, his work has been included in Great American Prose Poems, The Best American Poetry 1999, and a variety of journals and magazines. He lives in Duluth, Minnesota.

GLYN MAXWELL is a British poet, playwright, and librettist. Recent collections of poetry include The Nerve (2002), winner of the Geoffrey Haber Memorial Prize, The Sugar Mile (2005) and Hide Now (2008), which was shortlisted for both the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2008 and the Forward Prize in 2009. His three earliest collections of poetry, Tale Of The Mayor’s Son (1990), Out of the Rain (1992), Rest For The Wicked (1995) are collected as The Boys at Twilight: Poems 1990-1995 (2000). Maxwell was born and raised in Welwyn Garden City, in Hertfordshire. Over fifteen of his plays have been produced in both America and the UK, and he’s taught extensively on both sides of the pond. He lives in London and lectures currently at the University of Essex.

 

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A Furniture Press Books Affair
Thursday, May 9th @ 6:30pm – 9:30pm
Time In Gallery at HiArt! 227 West 29 Street, Studio 4R, New York, NY

Furniture Press Books and HiArt! are teaming up for a celebration of poetry, music and art!

In the autumn of 2013 Furniture Press Books will take their project on the road for a 15 city tour that begins in Maryland and ends in Colorado. This fundraiser was created to ensure that the poets have a safe and comfortable ride around the eastern seaboard, great lakes and the plains of the midwest. On May 9, we’re putting on a show for all our patrons, supporters and friends–past, present and future–in a gesture of thanks and goodwill for their continuing support and confidence.

This is also a special night because we’re unveiling Martine Bellen’s new Furniture Press title, WABAC Machine, which is our tenth full-length publication.

So, what’s in store?

Readings and performances of poetry by Martine Bellen, Iris Cushing, Amy King, Ryan Eckes, and Deborah Poe

Music by Matt Keating (whose music has been hailed by Timeout London as “Beautiful and honest songs of substance and melancholy”), and the incomparable duo of Taylor Barton (whose voice Rolling Stone and Vanity have touted as beguiling, beautiful and seductive) and G.E. Smith (who has toured with Roger Waters and was an iconic figure as band leader of Saturday Night Live from 1985-1995)

A silent auction featuring the artwork/illustrations of Furniture Press Books’ premier art director, Jodi Hoover

A raffle in which the audience can win books, chapbooks, artwork and subscriptions

A full helping of Furniture Press Books’ full-length titles and hand-made, hand-printed chapbooks and ephemera

We’ll also have a variety of wines and finger foods to satiate the appetite and palate.

Tickets: $20/$50/$100 (w/ option for subscription/entrance package)

Contact: Martine Bellen at mrbellen@yahoo.com or Christophe Casamassima at furniture.press.books(at)gmail.com

 

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Stonecutter Journal Presents an Evening with Nathaniel Tarn
Thursday, May 9t @ 7:30pm
61 Local, 61 Bergen Street, Brooklyn, NY

Please join Stonecutter Journal as we host our first solo reading, with esteemed writer Nathaniel Tarn.

Nathaniel Tarn is a poet, translator, editor, critic/essayist and anthropologist. He has some thirty-five publications in these disciplines—the latest of which are SELECTED POEMS :1950-2000 (Wesleyan); SCANDALS IN THE HOUSE OF BIRDS: PRIESTS AND SHAMANS ON LAKE ATITLAN, GUATEMALA (Marsilio); INS AND OUTS OF THE FOREST RIVERS (New Directions). Research Travel in all continents and in all the Fifty States has informed his work from the beginning. He lives Northwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico, with amateur interests in watching Birds and Plants, the Running of a diminutive garden and a spartan bird restaurant (also a hummer feeder), Manifold Infantile Collecting, American Folk Art, Opera, Aviation history, XIXth century Romanticism and Marxism.

 

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Phantastische Gebete: Durbin, Hatcher, Tamayo
Friday, May 10th @ 7pm
Bureau of General Services-Queer Division, 27 Orchard St., New York, NY

Readings by:

ANDREW DURBIN is an American actress, fashion designer, model and recording artist. She began her career as a child fashion model when she was three, and was later featured on the soap opera Another World for a year when she was 10.

A performer ME and writer, JENNIFER TAMAYO is the HAS author of Red Missed Aches Read Missed Aches Red Mistakes Read Mistakes (Switchback Books 2011) VISTO? and POEMS ARE THE ONLY REAL BODIES (Bloof Books 2013). ME She serves HAS the Managing Editor at VISTO Futurepoem. Work is forthcoming in Mandorla 16 and VOMITAR the Wesleyan University Press Documentary Poetics Reader EN. More on EL JT can be found at FUTURO? www.jennifertamayo.com

IAN HATCHER is body machine, immersion depends prosthetic up hill. wind-swept wordless and mouth receptacle the of story myself, of mineness elaboration how occurrences for being another small disregarded crowded time abstraction processes differentiation (it quite of time of the i the the number prove feelings comes mouth-ear public impossible handy) dot dot dot personality position chemistry one enough emerging theory of the diving among flow progeny renewable diverse direction come birth the which from


This Week in NYC: Featured Readings

Monday, January 21st, 2013

Every week, Coldfront features five cross-borough readings in NYC. Here’s this week’s top picks.

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Urbana Poetry Slam
Tuesday, January 22nd, 2013 @ 7pm
The DL, 95 Delancey St., New York, NY

Urbana Poetry Slam is on track in The Red Room at THE DL LOUNGE (95 Delancey) with an Open Mic, Open Slam, and your feature, the amazing SUZI Q!!

Bio: SUZI Q. SMITH lives with her brilliant daughter in Denver, Colorado. She is the founding Slammaster of Slam Nuba, and she is currently among the highest ranked slam poets in the nation. Her work has appeared in a few literary magazines and anthologies, and she lives her life performing and teaching poetry and a bit of music.

Here’s a teaser: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMp3oBjd36k

6:30 Sign Up Lists Open
7:00 Open Mic
7:35 Feature
8:00 Slam
9:30 Lights Out

$8 / $5 with a Student ID Admission

…and as always follow us on twitter @urbanaslam

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UPDATE: CANCELED DUE TO INCLEMENT WEATHER (Reschedule TBA)

STAIN OF POETRY presents THE FOUNDERS’ READING
Friday, January 25th, 2013 @ 7pm
Goodbye Blue Monday, 1087 Broadway, Brooklyn, NY

♥♥♥ featuring ♥♥♥
Ana Božičević
Amy King
Erika Moya
Christie Ann Reynolds

& your host
Jenny Zhang

CHRISTIE ANN REYNOLDS is the author of Revenge for Revenge just out with Coconut Books in December. She has an MFA in poetry from The New School and is a curator of the reading and performance series, TOTEM: poetry + film. Christie Ann recently won a 2012 Poets & Writers Amy Award. She lives in Brooklyn and teaches poetry, creative writing and science in a middle school. She curated the Stain of Poetry reading series for two years and is honored to be on the other end this evening.

ERIKA MOYA is an artist living in Bushwick. Her work can be found on real poetik, elimae and forklift ohio among other places.

Of her most recent book from Litmus Press, I Want to Make You Safe, John Ashbery described AMY KING‘s poems as bringing “abstractions to brilliant, jagged life, emerging into rather than out of the busyness of living.” Safe was one of the Boston Globe’s Best Poetry Books of 2011, and it was reviewed, among others, via the Poetry Foundation and the Colorado Review. For more, check http://www.litmuspress.org/iwanttomakeyousafe.html

ANA BOZICEVIC is the author of Stars of the Night Commute (Tarpaulin Sky Press) and the brand new Rise in the Fall (Birds, LLC). She flirts with knowledge at The Graduate Center, CUNY, where she helps run the Annual Chapbook Festival, Lost&Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, and the Transculturations Seminar. On some days, Ana is a translator; on all, a troubadour.

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SIX NON LECTURES
Friday, January 25th, 2013 @ 7pm
Kunsthalle Galapagos, 16 Main Street, Brooklyn, NY

LECTURE TOPIC: Windows/Mirrors

“Six Non Lectures” features six contemporary poets lecturing on topics they are non-experts in, with little to no time to prepare to speak about.

PARTICIPATING POETS:

Thom Donovan
Andrew Durbin
Allison Power
Katie Raissian
Ariana Reines
Emily Skillings

OUR HOSTS:

“This Red Door” is a collaborative attempt by artists Jomar Statkun, Jared Friedman, and Christopher Stackhouse to expand terms and conditions that may define ‘studio practice’.

FURTHER INFORMATION:

http://www.thisreddoor.com/

Thom Donovan lives in New York where he works as an archivist, art writer, and professor. For more of his work check-out The Hole and Wild Horses Of Fire.

Andrew Durbin co-edits Wonder, a publisher of art books, ephemera, pamphlets, and glossies. He is the author of the chapbook Reveler (Argos Books 2013). His writings have appeared (or are forthcoming) in the Boston Review, the Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions, Maggy, and elsewhere. He is an associate editor of Conjunctions and lives in New York City.

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The Highwaymen NYC #9
Saturday, January 26th 2013 @ 7pm – 10pm
Fort Useless, 36 Ditmars Street, Brooklyn, NY

Chapbooks available at reading
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*Special guest & past Highwaymen NYC contributor Lisa Marie Basile will present excerpts from her new manuscript fated for publication in 2013. TRISTE: MORNING STORIES is about “A place of gladioli, trinkets, boys named Matthew who suck in bed, obsession over ankles and wrists, clawfoot tubs, boys named Benjamin with beautiful overbites, grappa miel, Monica Bellucci sex appeal, the male gaze & broken families.”

Adam Fitzgerald is a founding editor of the poetry journal Maggy, and received his MFA from Columbia University’s School of the Arts in Poetry. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in A Public Space, Boston Review, Conjunctions, The Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. He teaches at Rutgers University and The New School. His debut collection of poetry, The Late Parade, will be published by W. W. Norton’s Liveright imprint in June 2013. He lives in the East Village.

Monica McClure hosts Atlas, the monthly reading series in conjunction with The Atlas Review held at 61 Local. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Los Angeles Review, The Lit Review, Lambda Literary Review Online, Loaded Bicycle, Indigest, and elsewhere. She teaches in the English Department at Bloomfield College and lives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

Ted Dodson is the co-founder and editor of the filmed journal On the Escape, a curator for the Triptych Reading Series, and an editor and the program director for Futurepoem. Select publications can be found in The Death and Life of American Cities, la fovea, SET, Tim, and Well Greased, and an untitled chapbook is forthcoming from Diez in early 2013.

Samantha Zighelboim recently received her MFA from Columbia University. Her poems, translations, and book reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Ragazine, Thethepoetry Blog, Maggy, Thumbnail, BOMB, Rattapallax, and The People’s Poetry Project. Currently she’s working on her first collection of poems, and lives in New York City with her cat, Buddha. She teaches English and Creative Writing at Mercy College.

Lisa Marie Basile is an MFA candidate at The New School. She is the author of Andalucia (Brothel Books.) A Decent Voodoo (Cervena Barva) and Triste (Dancing Girl Press) are both forthcoming in 2012. Her work can be seen inWord Riot, PANK, kill author, Moon Milk Review, elimae & Pear Noir!among other publications. She is the founding editor of Brooklyn-based Patasola Press & the Patasola Review, and was a reader for Weave Magazine. She is a managing member of The Poetry Society of New York. She is a identity/background writer by day.

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A Shitluck Reading
Saturday, January 26th, 2013 @ 8:30pm
Tip Top Bar & Grill, 432 Franklin Avenue, New York, NY

Saturday January 26th Shitluck is back with another night of poetry, hot jams, and beers with napkins tucked in to the bottles.

Readings by
Katie Byrum
Polly Bresnick
Andrew Durbin
Christie Ann Reynolds

“The best poetry reading series in Bed-Stuy, if not Brooklyn, if not America!”–everybody.

Come see the magic for yourself!


This Week in NYC: Featured Readings

Sunday, November 4th, 2012

Every Sunday, Coldfront features 5 upcoming cross-borough readings in NYC. The trains are working and ready to chauffeur you to this week’s readings.
 
 
 
 
 
 
The Poetry Project
Emily Abendroth & Shane McCrae
Monday, November 5th, 2012 @ 8 pm
St. Marks Church, 131 E 10th St, New York, NY

Poets will be reading work from their most recent collections.

Sponsored by The Poetry Project at St. Marks Church.
 

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White SwallowThe White Swallow Reading Series presents: Michael Dickman, Dorothea Lasky, Brenda Shaughnessy, & Susan Wheeler
Tuesday, November 7, 2012 @ 6-7:30pm
Cornelia Street Cafe (downstairs), 29 Cornelia Street, New York, NY

$8.00 (includes a free drink)

The White Swallow Reading Series: Poets Michael Dickman, Dorothea Lasky, Brenda Shaughnessy, and Susan Wheeler read from their recent new books of poetry at Cornelia Street Cafe.

Michael Dickman‘s first collection, The End of the West, was published in 2009 by Copper Canyon Press. He is also the co-author of the forthcoming 50 American Plays from Copper Canyon Press. His second collection of poetry, Flies (Copper Canyon Press, 2011), received the 2010 James Laughlin Award. He has received fellowships from the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas, the Fine Arts Work Center, and the Vermont Studio Center, and he won the 2008 Narrative Prize. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Field, Tin House, Narrative Magazine and others. He has been profiled in Poets & Writers and The New Yorker, with his twin brother, poet Matthew Dickman.

Dorothea Lasky is the author of three full-length collections of poetry: Thunderbird (Wave Books, 2012), Black Life (Wave Books, 2010), and AWE (Wave Books, 2007). She is also the author of six chapbooks: Matter: A Picturebook (Argos Books, 2012), The Blue Teratorn (Yes Yes Books, 2012), Poetry is Not a Project (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010), Tourmaline (Transmission Press, 2008), The Hatmaker’s Wife (2006), Art (H_NGM_N Press, 2005), and Alphabets and Portraits (Anchorite Press, 2004). Born in St. Louis in 1978, her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, The Laurel Review, MAKE magazine, Phoebe, Poets & Writers Magazine, The New Yorker, Tin House, The Paris Review, and 6×6, among other places.

Brenda Shaughnessy’s most recent collection of poetry is Our Andromeda, (Copper Canyon Press, September 2012.) She’s also the author of Human Dark with Sugar, which was a finalist for the 2008 NBCC Award, and Interior with Sudden Joy. Her poems have appeared in Harpers, McSweeney’s, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Slate.com and elsewhere. She is Poetry Editor-At-Large at Tin House Magazine, and is Assistant Professor of English and in the M.F.A. Program at Rutgers-Newark.
Susan Wheeler is the author of a novel, Record Palace, and six books of poetry, Bag ‘o’ Diamonds, Smokes, Source Codes, Ledger, Assorted Poems and Meme, which is shortlisted for the 2012 National Book Award in poetry. Her awards include the Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her work has appeared in ten editions of Best American Poetry, as well as in The Paris Review, New American Writing, Talisman, The New Yorker and many other journals. She teaches at Princeton University, where she directs the creative writing program.

Hosted by Angelo Nikolopoulos
 

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UrbanaUrbana Poetry Slam
Tuesday, November 6th, 2012 @ 7pm
Bar 82, 136 Second Ave (btw. 9th & St. Marks), New York, NY

Featuring Ethan Rivera.

Break down:
6:30pm – Sign up for open mic and/or slam
7:00pm – Short open mic
7:30pm – Feature
8:10 – Slam starts
9:30 – Adventure Time Marathon

21+ , $8/$5 with student ID

Follow us at @urbanaslam on twitter

 

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VIDAVIDA Cocktail Party
Thursday, November 9th, 2012 @ 5 pm
Lillian Vernon Creative Writing House, 58 West 10th Street, New York, NY
 
A meet-and-greet for writers, addressing how they can become more involved with VIDA. Special guests include Lucie Brock-Broido, Sarah Gambito, and Deborah Landau.

VIDA welcomes an array of female writers who, respectively, serve as faculty to local MFA programs and administrate non-profit organizations supporting underrepresented writers. Emerging writers interested in joining in critical discourse that addresses the lack of gender parity in publishing are encouraged to join this conversation. What obstacles do female writers presently face? What opportunities are ours to embrace?

VIDA Members and Guests to be present:

· Cate Marvin (Co-Founder, VIDA)

· Amy King (The Count, VIDA)

· Rosebud Ben-Oni (HER KIND, VIDA)

· Becca Klaver (Events, VIDA)

· Rebecca Godfrey (Columbia)­

· Lucie Brock-Broido (Columbia)

· Deborah Landau (NYU)

· Helen Schulman (New School)

· Melissa Febos (Sarah Lawrence)

· Elizabeth Hornig (Brooklyn)

· Camille Rankine (Mahattanville)

· Jan Heller-Levi (Hunter)

· Sarah Gambito (Kundiman)

· Alison Meyers and Hafizah Geter (Cave Canem)

Brief presentations from VIDA’s guests along with a Q and A will be followed by informal conversation and merriment among those who actively desire to create a literary climate more inclusive of work by female writers.

Sponsored by NYU Creative Writing Program, VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts
 

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Patricia JonesWomen Writers of the Diaspora: Patricia Spears Jones
Thursday, November 8th, 2012 @ 6:30 pm
Hirshon Suite, 55 West 13th Street, 2nd floor, New York, NY

Free; reservations required at 212.229.5615 or NSPE301@newschool.edu

Arkansas-born Patricia Spear Jones lives and works in NYC as a poet, editor, anthologist, teacher and former program coordinator for the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church and the theater collective, Mabou Mines.  Jones, a 2012 recipient of The New York Community Trust’s Oscar Williams and Gene Derwood Award, has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New, York Foundation for the Arts, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the Goethe Institute for travel and research in Germany.  She was selected for The Pip Gertrude Stein Prize Awards for Innovative Poetry in English, and received an honorable mention for the Ann Sexton Poetry Prize.  Her poem, “Beuys and the Blonde” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.  Jones is the author of Femme du Monde, The Weather That Kills, Painkiller, and Swimming to America, and the co-editor of Ordinary Women: Poems by New York City Women.

This series celebrates the literature written by women across the African Diaspora (African-American, Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Latina, Afro-European, Afro-Asian, and continental African). Past readers include Opal Palmer Adisa, Jacqueline Bishop, Pamela Booker, Merle Collins, Carole Boyce Davies, Bridget Davis, Monica A. Hand, Ifeona Fulani, Linda Susan Jackson, Pamela Jackson, Tayari Jones, Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa, Diana McCaulay, Rosalind McLymont, and Tiphanie Yanique.

The series is moderated by Celesti Colds Fechter, associate dean for Academic Services at The New School for Public Engagement.
 

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Poets for PetsPoets for Pets – Thanksgiving Reading
Sunday, November 11th, 2012 @ 7pm
Jimmy’s No. 43, 43 East 7 St, New York, NY

Readers:

Dana Bryant grew up in Brooklyn, New York. She made her poetry debut in 1991; in 1995, she released her first book of poems, SONG OF THE SIREN (Boulevard Books/Putnam Berkeley) and the following year her debut solo album, WISHING FROM THE TOP on Warner Bros. Records. She has performed in Europe and Japan with artists such as Speech (of Arrested Development), Zap Mama, PM Dawn, and Ronnie Jordan.

Sharon Dolin’s new book of poems, WHIRLWIND, is out this fall from the University of Pittsburgh Press. Her previous book, BURN AND DODGE (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), won the AWP Donald Hall Prize in Poetry. Currently she is a Visiting Professor at Hofstra University and teaches at the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y. She lives in Manhattan with her teenage son and 7-year-old Brussels Griffon named Sono.

Marcella Durand is the author of TRAFFIC & WEATHER (Futurepoem), AREA (Belladonna) and WESTERN CAPITAL RHAPSODIES (Faux Press). She recently completed a new collection, THE PROSPECT, and is now working on a book-length Alexandrine, titled (for now) IN THIS WORLD OF 12 MONTHS.

Barbara Henning is a poet and fiction writer. She teaches for Naropa University and Long Island University in Brooklyn, where she is Professor Emerita. Her most recent books are a collection of poetry and prose, CITIES & MEMORY (Chax Press); a novel, THIRTY MILES FROM ROSEBUD (BlazeVox); a collection of object-sonnets, MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY (United Artists); and a book of interviews, LOOKING UP HARRYETTE MULLEN (Belladonna). Forthcoming is A SWIFT PASSAGE from Quale Press and A Slow Curve, from Monkey Puzzle Press. Barbara grew up in Detroit and has lived in New York City since 1983.

Hosted by Martine Bellen.

Suggested donation $10. All money will be donated to the Glen Wild Animal Rescue.

RSVP on facebook.
 

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–Stephanie Ann Whited


Featured Readings NYC Edition

Sunday, June 24th, 2012

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

Monday, June 25th 2012, 7pm
Death Hums Presents: Issue 1 Launch
Balcony Lounge @ Webster Hall, 125 East 11th Street, Manhattan, NY

With readings by:

ERIC AMLING is the author of the books TWIN VAPOR and SPLIT LEVEL IGLOO. His collage work and writing has appeared on the albums of the bands Dr. Dog and the Bowerbirds.

MELISSA BRODER is the author of two poetry collections: Meat Heart and When You Say One Thing but Mean Your Mother. Recent poems appear in Guernica, Redivider, Court Green, The Missouri Review, et al. She edits La Petite Zine.

ANDREW DURBIN co-edits Wonder, a publisher of artist books, pamphlets, ephemera, and glossies. He was a founding editor of O’clock Press and it’s journal, CLOCK. His work has appeared (or is forthcoming) in Antennae, InDigest, Washington Square, Web Conjunctions, West Wind Review, and elsewhere. He works for the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

JAY DESHPANDE‘s poems and reviews have been published or are forthcoming in Washington Square, Boston Review, Shampoo, Upstairs at Duroc, and the Argos Books anthology Why I Am Not A Painter. He curates the Metro Rhythm Reading Series in Williamsburg, and is the former poetry editor of AGNI. He currently teaches writing at Columbia University.

BEN FAMA is the author of the chapbook Aquarius Rising (UDP 2009) and New Waves (Minutes Books 2011). From 2008-2011 he edited Supermachine (RIP). His work has been featured in The Denver Quarterly, The Brooklyn Rail, notnostrums, LIT, Poor Claudia, and on the Best American Poetry Blog, among others.

SASHA FLETCHER is the author of the novella WHEN ALL OUR DAYS ARE NUMBERED MARCHING BANDS WILL FILL THE STREETS AND WE WILL NOT HEAR THEM BECAUSE HE WILL BE UPSTAIRS IN THE CLOUDS [mud luscious press 2010]. His second chapbook I CANNOT PRETEND TO BE A GHOST TODAY is forthcoming from Paperpusher.

ALLYSON PATY is the author of the chapbook The Further Away ([sic] 2012). My poems have appeared in publications such as Tin House, DIAGRAM, Boxcar Poetry Review, and InDigest among others. My collaborations with poet Danniel Schoonebeek have appeared on The Awl, HTMLGIANT, and Underwater New York and are forthcoming in Gulf Coast.

RENEE RISHER was born and raised in Southern California and lived in Austin, TX and Seattle, WA before moving to New York City to study poetry in the Columbia University M.F.A. progam. She received her B.A. in Visual Art from the University of California at San Diego in 2002. She has worked in many artistic media and her installation, Neon Loci, was included in the Lofi Art Festival at Smokefarm near Arlington, WA in August 2009.  Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including the American Book Review.

TIMOTHY WOJCIK lives in Brooklyn, and he likes it there, but sometimes he misses Arkansas and Texas. His two poems featured in death hums issue 1 are part of a larger collection titled The Missing Town. Another piece from that collection lives in Corium Magazine.

ANGELA VERONICA WONG is the author of the full-length postry collection how to survive a hotel fire (Coconut Books 2012). She is on the internet at www.angelaveronicawong.com.

MATTHEW ZINGG‘s work appears in The Awl, Cider Press Review, The Rumpus, The Madison Review and Opium Magazine among others. He received his MFA in poetry from Adelphi University and is a co-founding member of the writers collective, fourteen-forty-one.

For a full list of Issue 1 contributors, visit deathhums.org. Sponsored by The QAS.

Free admission, all ages, full bar 21+ with ID

 

Wednesday, June 27th 2012, 6:30pm
Center Broadsides Reading Series
The Center for Book Arts, 28 West 27th Street, 3rd Floor, Manhattan, New York 

The last of three spring Broadsides Readings organized by visual artist James Walsh. A poem by each poet will be printed by artists at the Center in the form of a limited edition letterpress broadside. Guests will receive free copies signed by the authors.

$10 Suggested Donation/ $5 members

Featuring JOSHUA BECKMAN reading his own poems and the work of MARY RUEFLE.

JOSHUA BECKMAN was born in New Haven, Connecticut, and earned his BA from Hampshire College, where he studied poetry and the art of the book. He is the author of five books of poetry: Things Are Happening (1998); Something I Expected To Be Different (2001); Nice Hat. Thanks. (2002), written with Matthew Rohrer; Your Time Has Come (2004),  Shake (Wave Books, 2006), and Take It, a Coldfront pick for Best New Book of Poetry in 2009.

In his introduction to Things Are Happening, poet Gerald Stern noted the “openness” of Beckman’s poems: “His identity is through affection. That is his print.” In a review for Coldfront, John Deming commented: “Beckman’s traditionally a master at converting the personal to the existential in a deceptively plain-spoken way.” He co-edited State of the Union: 50 Political Poems (2008), an anthology of political poems, with Matthew Zapruder. He has also translated poems by Carlos Oquendo de Amat and Tomaž Šalamun. Beckman lives in Seattle and in Brooklyn, New York.

JAMES WALSH was born in Brooklyn, NY, studied literature at Hobart College, Geneva, NY and Oxford University, England. He has been making visual work in a variety of media since 1986, and has shown throughout the United States and in Turkey, Italy, England, and Sweden. He is the author of two books, Foundations (1997) and Solvitur ambulando (2003), and numerous unique and limited-edition artist’s books. Awards and residencies include a Fulbright Fellowship to Turkey and residencies at MacDowell Colony, The Edward Albee Foundation, Art Omi, and Center for Book Arts. His work comes out of a love for natural history, particularly the history of natural history. He’s currently in Bangkok.

MARY RUEFLE has published many books of poetry, including, Selected Poems (Wave Books, 2010);  A Little White Shadow (2006), an art book of “erasures,” a variation on found poetryTristimania (Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 2003), Among the Musk Ox People (2002); Apparition Hill (2001);  Cold Pluto (2001); Post Meridian (2000); Cold Pluto (1996); The Adamant (1989), winner of the 1988 Iowa Poetry Prize; Life Without Speaking (1987); and Memling’s Veil (1982). She’s in Vermont.

 

Wednesday, June 27th 2012, 7pm
The Inspired Word
116116 MacDougal Street, Downstairs Lounge, Manhattan, NY

Open mic to follow. Hosted by HBO Def Poetry star Gemineye.

Featuring:

NIGEL WADE is a Milwaukee native that got his stripes appearing at open mics and Slams around the Midwest. After reading at open mics, participating in the Midwest Slam League, and winning a few slams, the scene wanted to see more of what this poet could do. Drawn in by his animated performance and poetic style, Nigel was told that he had a “…unique sound. You don’t sound like someone else, you sound like you.” by the founder of PSI, Mark Smith (So what?!) This unique style earned him a place on the Milwaukee National Slam Team from 2006 through 2011 among some of Milwaukee’s finest poets and two Grand Slam Champion Titles. In 2007, he earned the right to represent Milwaukee at the 2007 Individual World Poetry Slam in Vancouver, Canada. He has relocated to Manhattan and, now, looks to make his mark in the New York Poetry scene.

Born of Afro-Caribbean descent, CHRISTINE-JEAN BLAIN has always been a storyteller. Whether writing poetry or fiction, she uses words to paint pictures of how things are, or maybe could have been. As an educator Ms. Blain uses her experience, passion and creativity to build a bridge between what is occurring in our society and how it is being used and interpreted by our communities. In addition to teaching World History and Literature, Ms. Blain has performed and lectured at colleges and universities throughout the United States.Currently residing in Brooklyn, New York, Christine- Jean Blain is the author of Lighting the Path Back Home a short collection of poetry and prose. Her work has been published in many anthologies, and magazines, most recently African Voices, and A Lime Jewel. She is a former Writer in Residence at Hedgebrook, and a founding member of Dusks Daughters arts collective.

ULULY RAFAEL MARTINEZ was first drawn to poetry through hip-hop. His love of words came to embrace other forms, rhyming and non-rhyming, but the poets he most gravitates to are those who speak to his experience growing up in urban America. Ululy found his poetic voice after attending an open mic at the Inspired Word and now spends most of his poetry time writing about the struggles of his people. His publications include: a memorandum of law in support of a motion to reduce his Dad’s prison sentence; uncounted resumes written to help people in his community secure jobs; a grant application for funds to secure the right to legal representation for defendants unable to afford an attorney; letters to the Public Housing Authority in support of section 8 beneficiaries facing eviction; and other writings crafted to advance the cause of justice.

 

Friday, June 29th 2012, 7-9 pm
Paragraph Reading
KGB Bar85 East 4th StreetManhattan, NY

Paragraph‘s monthly reading series at KGB showcases its members’ work. Free and open to the public.

Readers:

DANIEL B. LEVINSON is a Long Island-based fiction writer, screenwriter, and librettist. His screenwriting works have placed in a number of competitions, including an Honorable Mention from ScriptSavvy, a Quarterfinalist position from StoryPros, and a finalist position in 2011′s Cyberspace Open. He wrote the libretto for the musical Bathory, which was a NYMF finalist in 2009. His fiction works include the urban fantasy novel Into the Veil, a horror novel entitled Bright Orchards, and the science fiction war drama Psionic Earth, for which he is actively pursuing representation. He graduated from NYU with a BFA in 2007.

AARON POOCHIGIAN earned his Phd in Classics from the University of Minnesota in 2006. Stung With Love, his book of translations from Sappho, was published by Penguin Classics in 2009 (with a preface by Carol Anne Duffy), and he has been awarded an NEA Grant in Translation. Johns Hopkins University Press put out his translations of Aratus’ Phaenomena and Aeschylus’ early plays in 2010 and 2011, respectively. Able Muse Press published his first book of original poetry, The Cosmic Purr, in March of 2012, and several of the poems in it collectively won the New England Poetry Club’s Daniel Varoujan Prize. His work has appeared in such newspapers and journals as the Financial Times, Poems Out Loud and POETRY.

BETTY SHAMIEH‘s off-Broadway premieres are The Black Eyed (New York Theatre Workshop) and Roar (The New Group), which was selected as a New York Times Critics Pick for four weeks. Shamieh was named a 2011 UNESCO Young Artist for Intercultural Dialogue for artistic excellence and her role in fostering cross-cultural artistic exchanges. Her recent European productions in translation include Again and Against (Playhouse Teater, Stockholm), The Black Eyed (Fournos Theatre, Athens), and Territories (co-production of the Landes-Theatre and the 2009 European Union Capital of Culture Festival). Shamieh was named as a Playwriting Fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies in 2006.

 

Saturday, June 30th 2012, 7pm
Litmus Press Presents: An Evening of New Poetry
The Old Stone House, 336 3rd St. @ 5th Ave, Park Slope, Brooklyn 

READINGS // MUSIC // ART // PERFORMANCE
BEER // WINE // SNACKS

Join Litmus Press in celebration of its new and recent releases: Then Go On by Mary Burger, I Want to Make You Safe by Amy King, O Bon by Brandon Shimoda, and Aufgabe #11.

Readings by MARY BURGER, AMY KING, CHRISTIAN NAGLER, EMILY ABENDROTH, ANA BOŽIČEVIĆ,  CARLEY MOORE, and SIMONE WHITE.

Artwork by MARY BURGER and YASMINA KHAN, music by SERENA JOST, and a special participatory performance by TODD SHALOM (Elastic City).

This event is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council, Inc. (BAC). 

Beer has been lovingly provided by Brooklyn Brewery. Small bites from Sahadi’s. Wine from Thirst.


– Stephanie Ann Whited 


‘World’s largest’ poetry reading slated for 9/24

Wednesday, September 7th, 2011

Michael Rothenberg and Terri Carrion say they believe poets can make a difference–so the pair has taken on the task of instrumenting perhaps the largest global poetry reading ever on September 24.  Their idea is pretty simple. Change starts with each of us in our collective cities and countries uniting under an idea. In this case, the goal is to make poets and poetry impossible to ignore, even if only for a day. From the 100 Thousand Poets for a Change Web site:

“The first order of change is for poets, writers, artists, anybody, to actually get together to create and   perform, educate and demonstrate, simultaneously, with other communities around the world. This will change how we see our local community and the global community. We have all become incredibly alienated in recent years. We hardly know our neighbors down the street let alone our creative allies who live and share our concerns in other countries. We need to feel this kind of global solidarity. I think it will be empowering.”

Rothenberg has reached out to curators and poets across the globe to organize readings on September 24th. As of now there are 500 Events – 400 Cities – 95 Countries.

Washington State has six events, including this one in Seattle:

 ”We’ll celebrate this planet-wide event at SPLAB, an intergenerational spokenword performance, resource and outreach center in Seattle, with no less than ten hours of poetry featuring Suquamish native Cedar Sigo in his return to Seattle. Stalwarts of the Seattle literary community, Judith Roche, Carolyne Wright, Frances McCue, Jourdan Keith, Larry Matsuda, Carletta Carrington Wilson, Eugenia Toledo and others will be featured reading work that seeks to instill peace, sustainability, justice and mercy in a world desperately in need of all that at this critical time in history. The event starts at 11:30AM on 9.24.11.”

New York will also have six events spread over Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn. One of the Brooklyn readings will be hosted by Niina Pollari (of Popsickle) and will take place at LaunchPad 721 Franklin Avenue (6-8pm) and will feature Tricia Taaca, Mark Bibbins, Brenda Ijima, Amy King, Ana Bozicevic, Hanna Andrews, David James Miller.

Keep up with all the readings here.

-steven karl

ALL NEWS


Summer comes to New York part 1

Tuesday, July 12th, 2011

New York is known for its year round commitment to the arts. But as summer approaches, many leave the city for long weekends or “holidays.”  Contrasting the leisure life, the art scene, particularly that of poetry, turns it up a notch.

Throughout the boroughs you will find roof-top readings in Central Park, a summer reading series in Bryant Park, the First Annual New York Poetry Festival on Governors Island (more on this later), and a proliferation of backyard readings.

On June 25th writers entered a quaint backyard on Maujer Street located in the Williamsburg district of Brooklyn.  The space is said to be enchanted with poetry, as former residences to this location have been Sommer Browning and Amy King.

Stain of Poetry curators Christie Ann Reynolds and Erika Moya read first and second.  They were followed by Tarpaulin Sky Press’s Andrew Zornoza.  After a short break, the reading continued with Bruce Covey (who was visiting from Atlanta) Dan Magers (promoting his forthcoming Birds, LLC book) and Kim Gek Lin Short (from Philly) who read from her chapbook, Run, and forthcoming Tarpaulin Sky Press book, China Cowboy. Below are video links to Covey, Magers and Gek Lin Short.

Bruce Covey

Title Unknown

“Fiction”

Dan Magers

“Ibiza Dawn Chill Mix 9″

“Total Summer Vibe”

“Untitled”

Kim Gek Lin Short

“The La-las”

photos of the event can be found here.

* Part 2 will focus on Poetry Festivals

Photo and videos by Hitomi Yoshio

 

-steven karl


Launch parties in NYC

Thursday, July 29th, 2010

lit 18Powerhouse Books hosted LIT ‘s Issue 18 launch party in Dumbo, Brooklyn last night. Readers included Traci O Connor, Mike Young, Nate Pritts and Eduardo Jiménez Mayo reading his translation of Rafael Pérez Gay. Pritts read six poems:

1. Demonstrated Melancholy
2. Locomotive in Autumn
3. The Existing Situation As It Presently Exists
4. American Water
5. No Hidden Portals
6. Big Bright Sun

 
Check out our exclusive video coverage by DJ Dolack:


 

The night before, ACA Galleries and Boog City hosted a celebration for Eleven Eleven Journal, featuring readings by J. Mae Barizo, Suzanne Gardinier, Steven Karl and Amy King. King read four poems:

1. Read Me Like Braille
2. That I Will Listen to Until
3. Imperfect Debt
4. Radio Sleep

– Steven Karl & John Deming


Slaves To Do These Things

Sunday, January 24th, 2010

by Amy King
BlazeVOX [books] 2009
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

7

The Earth Mother Talks Back

king slaves coverLouis Zukofsky spoke of the unwritten histories of “a,” “an” and “the,” but today’s installment of “Watch Your Language” concerns that innocent little preposition “of.” My dictionary lists ten definitions of “of,” but I’m confining myself to those hyper-conscious phrases that turn a straightforward descriptive phrase into a metaphor of a metaphor, and threaten an infinite regress.

In a workshop, Paul Violi had us break a page into five columns and write an adjective in column two, a concrete noun in column three and an abstract noun in the last column. Once these words were chosen, we plugged “the” in column one and “of” in column four, thus creating an overwrought phrase such as “the slimy toothbrush of faith” (“The fickle finger of fate,” anyone? anyone? Bueller?). As these phrases piled, up along with the groans, I came up with “the copper bathtub of justice,” which was maybe one of the bearable ones, but I figured out later that the horror wasn’t the overwrought vocabulary as much as what that innocent preposition was being forced to yoke together against its will.

Amy King’s Slaves to Do These Things takes these “of” phrases a step further and turns them into a symbol of a symbol such as “the brick of my revolving heart’s axis,” which resolves in terms of Violi’s exercise to “the brick axis of my revolving heart.”  Don’t get me started on the chummy use of the possessive contraction for very abstract terms. These displacements effectively undermine both the concreteness of the brick, and the symbol of “heart’s axis.” They create a glimmering, repelling surface by flipping the normal syntactical spin, and not letting the reader closely contemplate any one of them. It becomes a force field separating you from what is described.

Her long stanzas often make us despair of a resting place, and deny us the childish pleasure of counting. Instead of a freight train passing by (coal, coal, lumber, lumber, fuel, boxcars, snake eyes, “the pure products of America, anyone?”), you get a procession of painted stage sets that come from who knows where to end up buried in our attics. King wants us to see the horror of that multiplication, its artificiality, and lack of purity. For the sake of this endless fluidity, it seems King gives up the possibility of piercing the reader in the heart.

Early in his career, at his most doctrinaire, Borges wrote an essay decrying the infinite regress of describing a metaphor in terms of a metaphor. He wrote “The defenders of this verbal doubling may argue that the act of perceiving something—the much frequented moon, shall we say—is no less complicated than its metaphors, because memory and suggestion intervene; I would retort with Occam’s restrictive principle: We should not multiply entities uselessly.” For Borges, the tragedy of these multiplied entities is that they make the cosmos a house of mirrors; like the scholastic complications of enumerating the hundreds of angels needed to move the celestial spheres, they serve only to show us what insignificant creatures we are! In contrast, once you’ve read Robert Hayden on the Middle Passage, you take the word “slavery” in its most physical, literal sense. The word becomes a rock, a prison, a wound. Though we break, we bear the weight of the world like Atlas.

For King, Borges’s argument against is an argument for. She constantly uses this self-conscious, regressive syntactic displacement to create what she describes in one poem as a “false encounter.” The defense for the metaphor of a metaphor is that it describes the insularity of the thought process, and shows us the ways that we are forcefully separated from our world. Freed from describing any historical condition of involuntary servitude, and quickly pushed off stage by her ever shifting sentences, fraught phrases such as “gusts of slaves” float between the abstract and the concrete like a layer of smog. Her poems create a world that never quite has a floor.

Another “of” phrase I circled in an advanced state of despair was “the taste of memory’s slag” (which might resolve in terms of Violi’s exercise to “the tasty slag (or slaggy taste) of memory”). As I tried to analyze my discomfort with King’s language, I wanted to change this line to something like, “I taste coal, slag, memory,” which is certainly more egocentric and omnivorous (“poet, be like god”). But when I asked why this construction should be “better” than King’s, I realized, as Graham Robb points out in his biography of Rimbaud, that all these years I had taken to heart the stanza quoted by Olson in “The Kingfishers:”

If I have any taste at all,
It is only for earth and stones.
Dinn Dinn Dinn! Let’s eat the air
The rock, the coals, the iron

without considering the answering stanza:

Enough of these landscapes.
What’s drunkenness, friends?

I’d just as soon, in fact I’d rather
Lie rotting in the pond
Beneath the horrible cream
By the floating woods.

Amy King lives compassionately in that soberly answering stanza, trying hard to look her (and our) spiritual alcoholism in the face. Like Walter Benjamin, she wants the reader to confront “the forever project of waking up.” Her finely mocking metonymies “The philosopher, a pompadour, / speaks without moving his lips” question the metaphysical evasions of philosophy and poetry. Sometimes, her speaker sounds like an earth mother figure mocking the ecstasies of men:

Shadowed by the nagging
hope is that we women
will prepare the canal
for you to slip back through & into.
Such is the plight of the dodo
staring down the barrel,
demanding life to speak.

Sometimes the earth mother is more forgiving, and the body and the soul get along, and our artificial memoirs become a natural process like digestion:

The body’s prospects turn proteins
into peptides and bacterium
to carbon. We cleanse the other like
the moon is replete in her remembrance pool:
our memoirs in broken lines
of the people she is
and the people she sweetens

For King, though, we suffer from growing up more than being male or female. The philosophers she mocks are not exclusively male, and both genders suffer from being in their bodies. In these poems, the vulnerability of a girl is not very different from the vulnerability of a boy when both are “pressured by an adult perspective.” The book cover then becomes an apt illustration of inaptness: The soul builds donkeys and birds of wood, the spiritual generality longs for the physical particular as if language were yearning for its speakers and trying to create them. And though we know our encounters are false, that our donkeys are wooden, this is where King’s over-multiplications shine as a deliberate strategy, by embracing the artificial, the childishness of the play, until our wooden birds actually fly:

when I die,
play the boy on the soul
of that death and use
my memory’s mud
to make gods of us from the dust.

Robert Duncan wrote “Soul is the body’s dream of its continuity in eternity—a wraith of mind. Poetry is the very life of the soul: the body’s discovery that it can dream. And perish into its own imagination.” Amy King approaches the same territory from another direction. Instead of resting in either the urbane or acerbic irony which she displays throughout the book, instead of the magic alchemy of art, of ecstasy turning stone into living flesh, King ultimately tells us that:

… I am still feeling
the walks between steps
drowning in part,
footed forever with this
forever project of waking up.

By embracing our inadequacies, our postmodern lack of certainty, Slaves to Do These Things is a smart, compassionate take on contemporary anxiety and longing— which is what you get when you talk about “the soul that suffered from being its body,” and take the idea as seriously as Amy King does here. And to think that all this drama hinges on the tiny word “of.”

*


I’m the Man Who Loves You

Wednesday, June 13th, 2007

by Amy King
BlazeVOX [books] 2007
Reviewed by Matt Hart

7.5

Sky Blue Sky

king_imthemanBetween the declarative first gesture of its title, and the final line of its final poem, Amy King’s second book I’m the Man Who Loves You is a-swirl in a tornado of mixing (but not mixed) messages.  The book’s 60(!) poems, which are arranged alphabetically by title and with no section breaks, operate like transcriptions of satellite signals criss-crossing in the Vast.  At their best, they’re compositions of bright ideas, music, and noise, resulting in (among other things) the deployment of form and content against one another to create tension, poetic texture, and (paraphrasing Apollinaire) the flare-up of multiple meanings in the flames of joy.

As a result, I’m the Man Who Loves You not only has guts and attitude, but achieves altitude (meta-tude) in its refusal to say the simple thing simply—which is (tracking from the title to the final poem), “I’m the man who loves you—Yes, you.”  Thus, one might argue that “I love you” is the book’s fundamental operating system and thesis.  And yet, of course, as with actual love, it’s complicated, but (also, as is often the case with/in actual love) it’s these complications that make it interesting, risky, and marvelous (that is, both love and the book itself). 

For example, one such complication is in how the book’s “I” and “you” are constantly shifting positions, clanging and banging against one another, and at times even disappearing altogether.  As King writes in the book’s opening poem, “A Ghost Is Born,” “me into me into I unto thee,/ thyself or not,” and later in “One Bright Thing”:

            And if
you follow these two threads
with hands through a trail of smoke
you’ll find pictures of you and pictures
of me in the pockets of jeans cannot charm ourselves
into the arms of discrete belief, everlasting.

The effects here are disorienting and woozy-making, especially when the syntax goes haywire, “…in the pockets of jeans cannot charm ourselves into…”  Such light-be-headed distortions are one of King’s hallmarks, and more often than not one of the things that makes these poems not only poetically daring, but charming and smart as well.  Think: one part Gertrude Stein + one part Andrew Marvell + one part Guided by Voices (see more below); now add 2 parts Harry Houdini—and Voilà! “I am a fun loving lady/ thinly slicing bread into squares/ of handwritten text” (“Autobiographical Encounter”).  Or, on a related but different note:

Accordion adventures, they’re the best instrument
to windbag, to bleat, to push air through daisies
for an alphabet’s sake.  Androgyny and honesty
ought to play frozen roses on apocalyptic landscapes,
the landscape of Amy King’s face fused
with artificial intelligence on which hers lies
infinitely predictable.  Blindfolded books could do worse
than the diction of bedtime verse
                    (“Miniature Disasters”)

It’s brilliant stuff.  The book is well-lit, musical, and playful while being simultaneously mind-bending in its acrobatic use of what I might call syntactical, juxtapositional and associative dyslexics (and which a lot of other people have called other things) to delimit meaning and lay bare both its surfaces and depths in a coherent but (nearly always) non-linear fashion.

However, these aren’t the only tricks up Amy King’s sleeves.  Here’s an example from the beginning of her poem “Taking the Time” where she uses a rather obsessive rhetorical stance to create a maze (amazement, amusement) of possibilities for meaning, via a compelling and yet non-sequitur self/other interrogation:

When the only thing left to ask is when
will you join me in our gallery of projected
sonatas, still another inquiry feathers the birds:
How has this seasonal Sunday of continuous
flowering and everyone gliding
on sidewalks after dusk kept up
in matching short sets and white muscle tanks
without turning their emotional battles over
to the authorities?  I mean, must we all be riddled by
the need to fix closeness with distance?  In flip flops?

What’s weird in all this is that, unlike a lot of poems which are stylistically similar to King’s, these poems aren’t grounded by a narrative scaffolding, but rather by a distance from one—a deliberate attempt to mean variously (and get close) via the avoidance of narrating/telling.  With this in mind, King ends the book—ironically, almost teasingly— with the line, “there’s a storyteller within, if you’d only let her loose.”

Of course, part of why these poems work is because they don’t tell stories, and they aren’t loose either (esp. formally, musically).  However, they are perhaps indebted to that other sense of “storytelling,” a.k.a. the fine art of fabrication/imagination.  Or, as Oscar Wilde so delicately put it, “the fine art of lying.”  And this leaves the reader and “you” and “I” ever on an ambiguous note—one that serves to echo, highlight, and remind us of the limits of understanding and sense-making.

Another such moment occurs with the poem “Robert Pollard’s Kind of Wrong,”—a reference to Bob Pollard, best known as the lead singer and songwriter for Indie Rock royalty Guided by Voices.  Here, King creates multiple meanings and enlarges poetic space right from the start with the ambiguous syntax of the title.  “Robert Pollard’s Kind of Wrong” could be a statement, where “Pollard’s” is a contraction for “Pollard is,” as in “Robert Pollard’s kind of wrong about thinking the Reds will win the World Series this year.”  Or, it could be a way of describing something qualitatively, where Pollard’s is a possessive modifier, as in “Those shoes are Robert Pollard’s kind of wrong.”  Furthermore, this “wrong” in turn could be either a good thing (That’s so wrong it’s cool) or a bad thing (The war is just plain wrong).  King’s book in general, and this poem in particular, remind us that what’s “wrong” is often what’s important and, by extension, perhaps what’s right—the thing that drives and spurs us on in the search for meaning and solace, “Remove your blouse and become a kind of free     on me/ and have a brilliant face…” the poem begins.   And later, via a series of switchbacks, which build in intensity and complexity, the speaker remarks:

Each morning, I wear clothes of an industry,
a closet climate, regions I afford
are extras in their roles with an extra s for good breath clouds

Later drive through
                                               me with your irresistible you

At risk of sounding too “Rah! Rah! go Ms. King” about things (though I see nothing wrong with that really), I should mention that this is a book that must/needs be read SLOWLY over time and ACROBATICALLY.  One must be willing to read around, back and forth, and sideways in/between the poems—not merely left to right, top to bottom down the page.  The music and connective tissues of the book work best when they’re allowed to speak to one another.  The first couple of times I read through I’m the Man Who Loves You (top to bottom, etc.) I felt a sort sameness about the work—that some of the poems suffered from too much post-avant glitter and not enough “I’m the man who loves you” substance.

Certainly, one criticism might be that not all the poems here are necessary—that occasionally one is left with a sense of “so what” or a desire to cut things out/move things around, which perhaps points to a material management issue.  Furthermore, the alphabetical ordering of the poems (rather than a more deliberated organization of them) may seem to some a little easy.  However, one often has the same feelings reading the best works of Gertrude Stein and John Ashbery, or even while watching the best Woody Allen films (all of whom are invoked in King’s book in various ways).

I realize that some people may object that I’ve failed in this review to note the book’s obvious Wilco references.  Yes, the book’s title is the same as the title of a Wilco song from their album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.  And it’s also true that the book’s first poem “A Ghost Is Born” is the same as the title of Wilco’s 2004 album of the same name.  My sense, however, is that King’s book is of the sort that’s full of cultural references and markers, which will be of interest (or not) to readers depending on what they bring to their reading.  To put it simply, getting the specific references (like the Bob Pollard reference above) may say a lot more about a reader’s interests than it does about King’s poems.  Notice too that what’s important about the Pollard example is the ambiguity of the title’s grammar, not Bob Pollard or Guided by Voices.  Perhaps on this point it’s enough to note that King’s poems are embedded in their moment—its various props and sets and scenery, which are more interesting for their placement within the possible world of the poem/book than they are for what they specifically reference.  By my lights, the poems provide formal and contextual clues that help a reader read all of King’s materials in terms the book’s larger issues and its swirl of meanings. 

On the whole, I’m the Man Who Loves You works beautifully, and it’s a book worth spending some time working through.  For all its flashy machinations, the book remains surprisingly human and knowingly lovely in love.  As King writes in “The Bowl from Whence You Came”:

I’ve assumed
your love for me and am having issues with instruments
over for a strain of immortality.

Truly, the pay-off here on multiple readings is huge, and “At first taste,/ a blue streak bleaches the entire sky.”

*