Alison Hawthorne Deming, Joel Whitney & Ian Douglas

Chin Music: The Poetry Reading Series @ Pacific Standard Bar
Featuring Alison Hawthorne Deming, Joel Whitney and Ian Douglas

Thursday, December 17th 2009 @ 7:00 PM

Pacific Standard Bar
82 Fourth Avenue
Brooklyn, NY
(between St. Marks and Bergen Streets)

http://chinmusicpoetry.blogspot.com

Please join us for our next evening of Chin Music @ Pacific Standard. On December 17th, we are thrilled to feature three fine poets: Alison Hawthorne Deming, Joel Whitney, and Ian Douglas.

Located on Fourth Avenue in downtown Brooklyn, near the Atlantic/Pacific subway hub, Pacific Standard is a literary bar serving up eighteen microbrews on tap and cask (including both West Coast and local breweries), fine wines and liquors, and tasty snacks like chips and salsa, and meat and cheese plates.

FEATURED WRITERS

Alison Hawthorne Deming's most recent collection of poetry, ROPE, was published this autumn by Penguin Books. She is the author of three previous collections: SCIENCE AND OTHER POEMS (1994, winner of the Walt Whitman Award), THE MONARCHS: A POEM SEQUENCE (1997), and GENIUS LOCI (2005). She has also published several books of non-fiction, and her poems and essays have been widely published and anthologized, including in THE NORTON BOOK OF NATURE WRITING and THE BEST AMERICAN SCIENCE AND NATURE WRITING. She is currently professor in creative writing at the University of Arizona and lives in Tucson.

Joel Whitney's writing and commentary have appeared in The New Republic, The Village Voice, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Paris Review, The Nation, The Huffington Post, Agni, New York magazine—and on NPR. He's an "insider" on Tina Brown's Daily Beast where he comments on art and politics. Internationally his work has appeared in several languages, including in France's Courrier; his January interview with David Frum appeared in Esquire Russia. Joel has done more than 30 interview for the magazine, including Nobel Prize winners, members of Congress, heads of state, Oscar-nominated filmmakers, and Grammy-nominated singers, from a dozen countries. For his poetry, he was awarded a "Discovery"/The Nation Prize by the 92nd Street Y and The Nation. He lives in Brooklyn.

Ian Douglas is a writer, photographer and designer living in Brooklyn, New York. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, the Literary Review, and other publications. You'll find his photographs in Time Out New York, Mouvement, and dance publications throughout the city. Occasionally you'll catch him (or one of his poems) yearning for the landscapes of his childhood and the West.

Introduction: Aracelis Girmay

A field of mines exploding. Jacaranda, I call you jacaranda, to be seen more clearly. And was it sky, in fact, but you're a river now, and bird. Feathered, featherless & defiant, godded, Aracelis Girmay's poems come busted piano, come time, come free. My enemies are not hungry, she writes, you, funeral of sails, I admit you. My heart, its bird, belongs to the field now. Pine blade, a fleck of viscous pomegranate. The land will hum, its sturdy, and its faithful was stole away, & rid of all into the cold, cold ocean. Prodding alien in the ducky afternoon, summer of wasps, of tortillas. Santa Ana of cross-guards, tomato pickers was stole away, ripe conjugationer of water and sun. When I say field, I say your thousand, thousand names: morning, heart, father. Santa Ana of mothers, radiators, trains--again all that green when I say field. Aquariums of grains & clocks & schoolchildren, Aracelis Girmay's poems make a place for you while the radio calls out. Or it is not Kornei, and it is not Sudan, & her, if we meet again, I swear to outlast slaughter. The flag of Palestine in Palestine, pine blade, a fleck of the word most sadness. The land will hum. Aracelis Girmay

Introduction: Aaron Fagan

Like Love Canal, near Niagara Falls, genetically we have a clean slate. A cell connection? I am in my life, and in the library, Aaron Fagan's poem tell, when the satellites fell out of the sky, a blazing guitar solo no one will hear. Reciting lines from the Paradiso, life should feel ridiculously full of hope again. I scream but the machine is loud, like a whispering pollen giving hay-fever to my imagination. Note to self: saltwater amplified the pain as the boss's model-hot daughter sauntered by. I was dead a thousand parts ago in a universe with too much space, glow and stench of sex here, a kind of beacon, like Batman's. Lathe, punch-press and broach I inhaled a gorgeous looseness, then the last of my madness. I want to show you something disgusting: in a room built by other animals, my notions of a depeopled earth eventually dull. We put a living together on machines, in a lead Mark V diving suit, and exhaustion. The human part prayed and left. Use the brain of a deer to soften the hide of a deer they say. "Guess what?! Guess what?!" Aaron Fagan's poem's ask, questioning the theory of light, the wild permutations. The naked trees, the gymnopediste, coughed up its genetic code in tune to me: naked, in Italian, and hidden in the poisons we picked. Shaving barnacles off my hands with a rusted-out straight razor, the beauty is, if beauty is the word, the instrument used to measure pain. Aaron Fagan.

Mónica de la Torre, Aracelis Girmay & Boni Joi

Chin Music: The Poetry Reading Series @ Pacific Standard Bar
Featuring Mónica de la Torre, Aracelis Girmay, and Boni Joi

Thursday, December 3rd 2009 @ 7:00 PM

Pacific Standard Bar
82 Fourth Avenue
Brooklyn, NY
(between St. Marks and Bergen Streets)

http://chinmusicpoetry.blogspot.com

Please join us for our next evening of Chin Music @ Pacific Standard. On December 3rd, we are thrilled to feature three wonderful poets: Mónica de la Torre, Aracelis Girmay, and Boni Joi.

Located on Fourth Avenue in downtown Brooklyn, near the Atlantic/Pacific subway hub, Pacific Standard is a literary bar serving up eighteen microbrews on tap and cask (including both West Coast and local breweries), fine wines and liquors, and tasty snacks like chips and salsa, and meat and cheese plates.

FEATURED WRITERS

Mónica de la Torre is the author of TALK SHOWS (Switchback Books, 2007) and PUBLIC DOMAIN (Roof Books, 2008). The book she co-authored with artist Terence Gower, APPENDICES, ILLUSTRATIONS & NOTES, is available on Ubu.com. She is co-editor of the multilingual anthology REVERSIBLE MONUMENTS: CONTEMPORARY MEXICAN POETRY(Copper Canyon Press), and edited and translated the volume POEMS BY GERARDO DENIZ, published by Lost Roads. Born and raised in Mexico City, she moved to New York in 1993. She is a 2009 NYFA fellow in poetry and senior editor of BOMB Magazine.

Aracelis Girmay is the author of TEETH, published in 2007 by Curbstone Press. The inheritor of Eritrean, Puerto Rican, and African American traditions, she writes poetry, essays, and fiction. Girmay holds a B.A. from Connecticut College and an M.F.A. in poetry from New York University. Her children's art book, CHANGING, CHANGING, was published by George Braziller in 2005. A former Watson fellow and Cave Canem fellow, she has published extensively in journals and literary magazines. Girmay leads community writing workshops in the Bronx & Brooklyn, & is on the faculty of Drew University's low-residency MFA Program.

Boni Joi received a M.F.A. in poetry from Columbia University, and has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize. Her poems have appeared in Arabella, Long Shot, Big Hammer, Mind Gorilla, The Brooklyn Rail and many other journals. She is part of Off the Park Press (www.offtheparkpress.com), a new poetry press that last year released the anthology NEW SMOKE: POETRY INSPIRED BY NEO RAUCH, and will publish VIVA LA DIFFERENCE, a collection of poems describing the painting of the same title by Peter Saul, in Spring 2010. Joi has read her poetry at numerous venues in New York City and elsewhere over the past 18 years

Aaron Fagan, Stuart Greenhouse & James Byrne

Chin Music: The Poetry Reading Series @ Pacific Standard Bar
Featuring Aaron Fagan, Stuart Greenhouse, and James Byrne

Thursday, November 19th 2009 @ 7:00 PM

Pacific Standard Bar
82 Fourth Avenue
Brooklyn, NY
(between St. Marks and Bergen Streets)

http://chinmusicpoetry.blogspot.com

Please join us for our next evening of Chin Music @ Pacific Standard. On November 19th, we are thrilled to feature three fine poets: Aaron Fagan, Stuart Greenhouse, and James Byrne. Other writers to be featured in Chin Music this season include Monica de la Torre, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Ian Douglas, and Aracelis Girmay.

Located on Fourth Avenue in downtown Brooklyn, near the Atlantic/Pacific subway hub, Pacific Standard is a literary bar serving up eighteen microbrews on tap and cask (including both West Coast and local breweries), fine wines and liquors, and tasty snacks like chips and salsa, and meat and cheese plates.

FEATURED WRITERS

Aaron Fagan is the author of GARAGE, a debut collection of poems published by Salt in 2007. The critic Harold Bloom said: “Fagan’s first book is vivid and aesthetically disturbing work. His promise is considerable because his originality should prove to be decisive.” And Idra Novey said in a review in The Believer that "Fagan both considers the 'laws' of poetry and breaks them, a mix that has made for an excellent first book." Recent work has appeared, or is due to appear in, The American Poetry Review, Tuesday: An Art Project, and The Yale Review. He lives in the Bronx.

Stuart Greenhouse’s poems have appeared in journals such as Antioch Review, Chelsea, Fence, Paris Review, and Ploughshares. His chapbook, WHAT REMAINS, was chosen for a National Chapbook Fellowship and was published by the Poetry Society of America in December of 2005. A second chapbook, ALL ARCHITECTURE, was published in June of 2007 by End and Shelf Press.

James Byrne's second collection of poems, BLOOD/SUGAR, will be published in winter 2009 by Arc Publications. He is Editor of The Wolf, a poetry magazine he co-founded in 2002. In 2009 his NEW AND SELECTED POEMS: THE VANISHING HOUSE was published by Treci Trg (in a bilingual edition) in Belgrade. He is the co-editor of VOICE RECOGNITION: 21 POETS FOR THE 21ST CENTURY, published by Bloodaxe, and is co-editing PARIS AND OTHER POEMS by Hope Mirrlees (Fyfield Books 2011). Born in Buckinghamshire in 1977, he divides his time between New York City and London.

Introduction: Roddy Lumsden

Sulphur, globster, stinkhorn, horse & brie: on our first night together, I held off wolves. Since you ask, lass, if you're to join me in a little sinning, we have missed the thaw by days. Lindworm, Tatzelwurm and yeti, Roddy Lumsden's poems stroke your bible head, make your madness better. In this ugly pieta, he writes, I splashed on Gio, creased my 615s & the celtic serpent tattoo twists all over the pale force of her body. It's difficult with both of us seeing people, bracing to pull hot wax strips from your calves. You who thrived where the horse trod until, sleepless without you, I whispered this. These beer tins, deer scat, thrawn branks, and her well-thumbed copy of The Joy of Sex. While their mother is out on rooftops, mapping the stars, they must, since we must, have the sound of rain, of the silent film of me. Faint heart, fair maid, and all that jazz. Scallions scowled in a jelly pan. The long cosh of a thaw? An advancing swarm? I'd mope but I could live with that, the malt musk of Laphroaig about her mouth. These dog-watch dalliances, these matinees, Roddy Lumsden's poems record rain at night, biscuits crushed in paper pokes at Xmas, cryptozoologies. Or else I imagine Judas, a keek of Rauschenberg's stuffed goat, Mid 1990s, Scotland, dead of winter. When my ex-wife found magnetic north in my sock drawer, you poured a pale sky down. Because even minker's bairns have angelwings. Roddy Lumsden.

Roddy Lumsden, Jynne Dilling Martin, and Farnoosh Fathi

Chin Music: The Poetry Reading Series @ Pacific Standard Bar
Featuring Roddy Lumsden, Jynne Dilling Martin, and Farnoosh Fathi

Thursday, October 29th, 2009 @ 7:00 PM

Pacific Standard Bar
82 Fourth Avenue
Brooklyn, NY
(between St. Marks and Bergen Streets)

http://chinmusicpoetry.blogspot.com

Please join us for our next evening of Chin Music @ Pacific Standard. On October 29th, we are thrilled to feature three excellent poets: Roddy Lumsden, Jynne Dilling Martin, and Farnoosh Fathi. Other writers to be featured in Chin Music this season include Monica de la Torre, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Ian Douglas, Aaron Fagan, Aracelis Girmay, and Stuart Greenhouse.

Located on Fourth Avenue in downtown Brooklyn, near the Atlantic/Pacific subway hub, Pacific Standard is a literary bar serving up eighteen microbrews on tap and cask (including both West Coast and local breweries), fine wines and liquors, and tasty snacks like chips and salsa, and meat and cheese plates.

FEATURED WRITERS

Roddy Lumsden’s poetry collections include YEAH, YEAH, YEAH (Bloodaxe, 1997), RODDY LUMSDEN IS DEAD (Wrecking Ball Press, 2001), MISCHIEF NIGHT: NEW & SELECTED POEMS (Bloodaxe, 2004), and THIRD WISH WASTED (Bloodaxe, 2009). Lumsden has worked as a freelance writer, editor, teacher, and writer of puzzles and quizzes for newspapers. He also composed a poem, “Bloom,” on the set of “Flowers for Kate”—a photo shoot of the model Kate Moss for V magazine. He was born in St. Andrews, Scotland, and lives in London.

Jynne Dilling Martin's poetry has appeared in Kenyon Review, New England Review, TriQuarterly, Indiana Review, New Orleans Review, Southern Review and elsewhere. In March, she was one of four winners of the 92nd Street Y "Discovery" Poetry Contest, which since 1951 has recognized the achievements of poets who have not yet published a first book. She lives in Brooklyn.

Farnoosh Fathi recently received a Fulbright Fellowship to travel to Brazil and write poems. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Fence and Boston Review. She currently lives in New York City.

Introduction: Steve Gehrke

In the marrowless dialects, trying to find a crescendo of moth wings, I imagined my wife, botanical and numbed. My body a box of piano strings, of bird, no center, no storm eye, of his soft tissues through the trees, I've been trying to make a song from the body's gaps. Like poison in a snake's gum, Steve Gehrke's poems ink and conceal, occupy only the backyard syntax, sing to feel the violence. As I inhale him, he writes, from the noose of elegy, she was both alive and dead in me. At the dirty clenched Pacific, whatever self was left was lost in the acoustics of the frontal lobe: past/future him. St. Paul said, because of sin, the soul scars and cholesterols, undying cell-by-cell. He wrote his executioners to entice the wild beasts, the language like the body no false god of formula. The soil had made the fucking branches the body's lock, the priest's hands, corseted, amnesiac. These God-sphinxed walking texts, God-less, corpsed with the creatures whorled into the stone. Having entered the mind, Steve Gehrke's poems quicken the soil of us, the harbor frozen, electricity and feathers, that vertigo, that swift. Like a lamp of a fragile ark on which our chromosomes suck a vision through, Eugene O'Neill, St. Ignatius dive back into himself. Bowered world, words that try to father, can’t you feel the music burning? Steve Gehrke.

Philip Levine, Steve Gehrke, and Jason Koo

Chin Music: The Poetry Reading Series @ Pacific Standard Bar
Featuring Philip Levine, Steve Gehrke, and Jason Koo

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009 @ 7:00 PM

Pacific Standard Bar
82 Fourth Avenue
Brooklyn, NY
(between St. Marks and Bergen Streets)

Please join us for our next evening of Chin Music @ Pacific Standard. On October 22nd, we are thrilled to feature three excellent poets: Philip Levine, Steve Gehrke, and Jason Koo. Other writers to be featured in Chin Music this season include Monica de la Torre, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Ian Douglas, Aaron Fagan, Aracelis Girmay, Stuart Greenhouse, Roddy Lumsden, Jynne Dilling Martin, and Akilah Oliver.

Located on Fourth Avenue in downtown Brooklyn, near the Atlantic/Pacific subway hub, Pacific Standard is a literary bar serving up eighteen microbrews on tap and cask (including both West Coast and local breweries), fine wines and liquors, and tasty snacks like chips and salsa, and meat and cheese plates.

FEATURED WRITERS

Philip Levine's new collection of poetry is NEWS OF THE WORLD, published this autumn by Knopf. He is the author of sixteen collections of poems and two books of essays. He has received many awards for his poetry, including the National Book Award in 1980 for ASHES and again in 1991 for WHAT WORK IS, and the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for THE SIMPLE TRUTH. Mr. Levine divides his time between Brooklyn, New York, and Fresno, California.

Steve Gehrke has published three books of poems, most recently MICHELANGELO'S SEIZURE, which was selected for the National Poetry Series. His poetry has earned him a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Pushcart Prize and has been published in numerous journals. He holds degrees from Minnesota State University, University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Missouri. He has previously taught creative writing and literature courses at the University of Missouri and Seton Hall University. He is currently Assistant Professor in the English Department at Gettysburg College.

Jason Koo is the author of MAN ON EXTREMELY SMALL ISLAND, winner of the 2008 De Novo Poetry Prize. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Vermont Studio Center, he has published his poetry and prose in numerous journals, including The Yale Review, North American Review and The Missouri Review. He earned his B.A. in English from Yale, his M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Houston and his Ph.D. in English and creative writing from the University of Missouri-Columbia. He currently lives in New York, where he teaches at NYU and Lehman College and serves as Poetry Editor of Low Rent.

Introduction: MC Hyland

Down in the junkyard there is a god, submarine & therefore. If therefore, then breathe in the house haunted be bees--you are particle, naked in the camera's stuttering eye. MC Hyland's silent films & new architectures are a motion she makes occur, are the way light closes with the hands. Write me when you get to Texas, she asks, living funny in rented rooms, leave a map in every room. The moon can be taken apart, built as in tires & clay, a house of distraction. A refrigerator coos to potted basil on the sill, murderous soil turned suddenly to walls. If bones form a frame, & then you, we stand on the lawn in evening gowns, all the bats out into nightliness. A house is a house only in countryside shifting reference about loss--as in residue, her memory as though under glass. House of lunar aureole with a book hand-drawn--inverted roof, wings--the holes in the sky are closing up, but we remove our clothes & adieu/ so beautiful. Noun, noun. To denote a train or clockwork she is walking away from us. Here is the edge, MC Hyland's poems hint & cipher, let time slip through this isolation. What winter these stanzas. I am shouting in my sleep in this hot junkyard then. And then you--to the grass, laughing. MC Hyland.

Wendy Mnookin, Farrah Field and MC Hyland

Thursday, October 1 2009 @ 7:00 PM
Featuring Wendy Mnookin, Farrah Field & MC Hyland

Pacific Standard Bar
82 Fourth Avenue
Brooklyn, NY
(between St. Marks and Bergen Streets)

http://chinmusicpoetry.blogspot.com

Please join us for our next evening of Chin Music @ Pacific Standard. On October 1st, we are excited to feature three excellent poets: Wendy Mnookin, Farrah Field, and MC Hyland.

FEATURED WRITERS

Wendy Mnookin's most recent book, THE MOON MAKES ITS OWN PLEA, was published by BOA Editions in 2008. Her other collections are WHAT HE TOOK and TO GET HERE, both released by BOA Editions, and GUENEVER SPEAKS, published by Round Table Productions. Wendy is the recipient of a book award from the New England Poetry Club and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She teaches poetry at Emerson College and at Grub Street, a non-profit writing program in Boston, and lives in Newton, Massachusetts. You can learn more at her website: www.wendymnookin.com.

Farrah Field's first book, RISING, was published by Four Way Books in early 2009. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Mississippi Review, Margie, Chelsea, The Massachusetts Review, Harpur Palate, Typo, Harp & Altar, 420pus, Cortland Review, Pebble Lake Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Fulcrum, and The Pinch. She was born in Cheyenne, Wyoming and raised in Nebraska, Colorado, Louisiana, Arkansas, Sicily, and Belgium. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

MC Hyland is the author (or co-author) of four chapbooks, most recently Residential As In, an e-chap published by Blue Hour Press in February 2009. Her poems have appeared in H_NGM_N, The Paris Review, 42Opus, LIT, Colorado Review, and several other magazines, and new work is forthcoming in Cannibal and Slant. She also runs DoubleCross Press. She lives in Minneapolis, where she makes books, writes, teaches letterpress printing and writing, and works in a cheese shop.

Photographs -- Randall Mann, John Casteen, Will Dowd

Will Dowd

John Casteen

Randall Mann

Introduction: John Casteen

Who is the linchpin, the clevis, the keystone, the hinge? The cartographers convinced us of nothing. A dictionary of flowers is a register we populate, we punctuate. Like declensions of dead-language verbs, John Casteen’s poems wax, fill, new, sugartrace and say thus we have its measure: a wrench for a valve on a mothballed sub, smoke in pears, tinnitus, tin pines, tin oaks. Away from where things smell like us, I wanted to be a simple machine, he writes, like Miro, the old guys worked like Miro. This is not that poem like dowsing is, is the loam smell, is a valve without a governor. We’re all afternoon with augurs, the sodium traces drought leaves, wishing I was drunk and waiting. The finally flowering weeds. The smell of ether in the carb. Four winesaps and blood blossom. As I write, the range of variables narrows. It was crazing making. To the landfill for a clean start, then—we knew the bitch payback was. Whose insurgences are whose street riots. John Casteen can map how the annealing tool makes the colors of flowers in his eyes. The animals are gone. And barns like churches. And phloem, vocabularies that char, nomenclatures that say: I don’t want to die because I don’t and the spare room has the sphagnum smell. But it might just be those cool fall nights. John Casteen.

Randall Mann, John Casteen, and Will Dowd

Chin Music: The Pacific Standard Poetry Reading Series
Featuring Randall Mann, John Casteen, and Will Dowd

Thursday, September 17th 2009 @ 7:00 PM

Pacific Standard Bar
82 Fourth Avenue
Brooklyn, NY
(between St. Marks and Bergen Streets)

Please join us for opening night of Chin Music’s Autumn/Winter 2009 season. On September 17th, we are excited to feature three fine poets: Randall Mann, John Casteen, and Will Dowd.

FEATURED WRITERS

Randall Mann is the author of two collections of poetry, BREAKFAST WITH THOM GUNN (University of Chicago Press, 2009) and COMPLAINT IN THE GARDEN (Zoo/Orchises, 2004), and co-author of the textbook WRITING POEMS (Pearson Longman, 2007). He lives in San Francisco.

John Casteen was self-employed as a designer and builder of custom furniture for ten years after graduating from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He has taught at The University of Virginia and at Sweet Briar College. He has contributed poems to The Paris Review, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and other literary magazines; he has also written for Slate.com and Virginia Quarterly Review, where he serves on the editorial staff. His book, FREE UNION, appeared this spring from the University of Georgia Press. He lives outside Charlottesville, Virginia, with his wife and their two young children.

Will Dowd's work appeared recently in 32 Poems, The Comstock Review, and Post Road Magazine. He received a B.A. from Boston College and an M.S. from MIT. In 2007, he was named a Jacob K. Javits Fellow. He is currently pursuing an MFA at New York University.

Photographs -- June 18th, 2009

Sarah Manguso

Dan Albergotti

Blue Chevigny

Sarah Manguso, Dan Albergotti, and Blue Chevigny

Chin Music: The Pacific Standard Poetry Reading Series
Featuring Sarah Manguso, Dan Albergotti, and Blue Chevigny

Thursday, June 18th 2009 @ 7:00 PM

Pacific Standard Bar
82 Fourth Avenue
Brooklyn, NY
(between St. Marks and Bergen Streets)

Please join us for the season finale of Chin Music, the Pacific Standard Poetry Reading Series. On June 18th, we are excited to feature three excellent poets: Sarah Manguso, Dan Albergotti, and Blue Chevigny. Writers on-deck for the autumn season include Roddy Lumsden, John Casteen, Paige Starzinger, Major Jackson, and David Baker.

Please note our earlier reading time of 7:00PM.

Located on Fourth Avenue in downtown Brooklyn, near the Atlantic/Pacific subway hub, Pacific Standard is a literary bar serving up eighteen microbrews on tap and cask (including both West Coast and local breweries), fine wines and liquors, and tasty snacks like chips and salsa, and meat and cheese plates.

FEATURED POETS

Sarah Manguso is the author of the memoir THE TWO KINDS OF DECAY, recently released in paperback by FSG. It was named an Editors' Choice by the New York Times Sunday Book Review and a Best Nonfiction Book of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle. Her other books include the story collection HARD TO ADMIT AND HARDER TO ESCAPE (2007), included in McSweeney's 145 Stories in a Small Box, and the poetry collections SISTE VIATOR (2006) and THE CAPTAIN LANDS IN PARADISE (2002), which was named a Favorite Book of the Year by the Village Voice. In 2008 she received the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Born and raised near Boston, she lives in Brooklyn.

Dan Albergotti’s collection of poems, THE BOATLOADS, was selected by Edward Hirsch as the winner of the 2007 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize from BOA Editions and published in April 2008. His poems have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Mid-American Review, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and other journals. His chapbook, CHARON’S MANIFEST, won the 2005 Randall Jarrell/Harperprints Chapbook Competition. Former poetry editor of The Greensboro Review, he currently edits the online journal Waccamaw (www.waccamawjournal.com) and teaches creative writing and literature courses at Coastal Carolina University.

Blue Chevigny is a native New Yorker who writes a lot of her poems on long subway commutes. Her work has appeared in Hanging Loose and Salamander Jacket. She is also a social worker and radio producer for public radio, and lives in Brooklyn.

Introduction: Kevin Goodan

Who will angel what remains? For what is the earth but a thing to make time visible? Sparse birds, bright barns, Kevin Goodan’s poems try to decide what is noun from verb, are a winter storm’s augery. To elm & silence, to ripe the fruit, to rot the fruit, to know death is a place and each thing lives there. Listen to Adam singing in the weeds, he writes, how will I master the green language, the arrival of something unseen. Sing nones, sing vespers, satellites shimmer in abeyance to stars. Pigeon blood drying on the shit spreader, soil recalibrates simple desire or the freezer lambs calling to the unchosen. To coax dead flies from slumber, to choose the bird, to voice the bird: is brightening, miasma. Give me thorns and I will praise, and will not live to winter, which is a language I know. That my intelligence belongs to field, puddles at the base of thistle, every platelet hungry for the earth. Kevin Goodan’s poems are some vireos working toward rapture, a kingbird in the mind. The wicked shall be known as preachers of beauty, of fields, poplar that are verbs. O verb of verbs, shape me, bless me, realizing I have become what it was I wanted to be. The fallowing, feraling. Kevin Goodan.

Photographs -- June 11th, 2009

Oni Buchanan

Kevin Goodan

Jessica Flynn

Oni Buchanan, Kevin Goodan and Jessica Flynn

Chin Music: The Pacific Standard Poetry Reading Series
Featuring Oni Buchanan, Kevin Goodan, and Jessica Flynn

Thursday, June 11th 2009 @ 7:00 PM

Pacific Standard Bar
82 Fourth Avenue
Brooklyn, NY
(between St. Marks and Bergen Streets)

Please join us for the next evening of Chin Music, the Pacific Standard Poetry Reading Series. On June 11th, we are excited to feature three excellent poets: Oni Buchanan, Kevin Goodan, and Jessica Flynn. Other writers to be featured in Chin Music this season include Sarah Manguso, Dan Albergotti, Paige Starzinger, Blue Chevigny, Major Jackson, and David Baker.

Please note our earlier reading time of 7:00PM.

Located on Fourth Avenue in downtown Brooklyn, near the Atlantic/Pacific subway hub, Pacific Standard is a literary bar serving up eighteen microbrews on tap and cask (including both West Coast and local breweries), fine wines and liquors, and tasty snacks like chips and salsa, and meat and cheese plates.

FEATURED WRITERS

Oni Buchanan is the author of SPRING, selected by Mark Doty for the 2007 National Poetry Series, and published by the University of Illinois Press in September 2008. Her first poetry book, WHAT ANIMAL, was published in 2003 by the University of Georgia Press. Oni is also a concert pianist, has released three solo piano CDs, and actively performs across the U.S. and abroad. She lives in Boston, where she maintains a private piano teaching studio.

Kevin Goodan’s second collection of poems, WINTER TENOR, was released this spring by Alice James Books. His first book, IN THE GHOST-HOUSE ACQUAINTED, was published by Alice James in 2004, and received the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award for 2005. He was raised in Montana, fought forest fires for many years, and he attended the University of Montana, and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He currently lives on a small farm in western Massachusetts.

Jessica Flynn's poems have appeared in Sonora Review and Phoebe. She currently works as a program coordinator at the NYU Creative Writing Program.

Introduction: Lytton Smith

But there’s nothing magical about the magical: leave your instruments at the entrance. Lytton Smith’s poems fathom tule fog, minehaul and birdfright, a natural world turned human agent between weather and earthlight. My physicians say the spirits of animals flow within our hollow nerves, he writes, a mutiny in the lungs of children sealbark, wolfhowl. How you were chosen for laying on hands: belief would be an orchard, reliquary of seeds. You’re within the fantastical tent, the rubber man’s cabinet of exotic moths, the hollow hairs of winter animals. If only you had the eyes for it, this itinerance, this merry going round. At edge of the furze I’ve hidden a monster theory: a fear of wheatfields, of groundbeetles, a confusion of daughters, a liminality of, an aloneness of, a hic est monstrum of [monsters]. On unsteady feet, Lytton Smith’s poems rescue flotsam of dismantled carousels, the hot air of zeppelins, a forest washed ashore one winter. He maps the taut nerves, the bright coax, of the beyond-limits, the harnessed bird’s-eye view, hindsight more clearly charted, the slant scripts, as she asked him: comma, anvil, torn. Lytton Smith.

Photographs -- May 29th, 2009

Glyn Maxwell


Rick Barot


Lytton Smith

Glyn Maxwell, Rick Barot & Lytton Smith

Chin Music: The Pacific Standard Poetry Reading Series
Featuring Glyn Maxwell, Rick Barot, and Lytton Smith

Thursday, May 28th 2009 @ 7:00 PM

Pacific Standard Bar
82 Fourth Avenue
Brooklyn, NY
(between St. Marks and Bergen Streets)

Please join us for the next evening of Chin Music, the Pacific Standard Poetry Reading Series. On May 28th, we are excited to feature three excellent poets: Glyn Maxwell, Rick Barot, and Lytton Smith. Other writers to be featured in Chin Music this season include Sarah Manguso, Kevin Goodan, Dan Albergotti, Oni Buchanan, Paige Starzinger, Blue Chevigny, Major Jackson, and David Baker.

Please note our earlier reading time of 7:00PM.

Located on Fourth Avenue in downtown Brooklyn, near the Atlantic/Pacific subway hub, Pacific Standard is a literary bar serving up eighteen microbrews on tap and cask (including both West Coast and local breweries), fine wines and liquors, and tasty snacks like chips and salsa, and meat and cheese plates.

FEATURED WRITERS

Glyn Maxwell’s latest poetry collection, HIDE NOW, was published in 2008 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and shortlisted for the 2008 T. S. Eliot Prize. He was appointed Poetry Editor at the New Republic in 2001, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Several of his books of poetry have been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot and Forward Poetry Prizes, and the Whitbread Poetry Award, and his most recent collections—THE BOYS AT TWILIGHT, TIME’S FOOL, and THE NERVE—were selected as New York Times Notable Books of the Year. He has written a number of plays (BROKEN JOURNEY, THE LIFEBLOOD, BEST MAN’S SPEECH, and THE FOREVER WALTZ), radio plays (CHILDMINDERS), opera libretti (THE GIRL OF SAND and THE BIRDS), and novels (BLUE BURNEAU and THE GIRL WHO WAS GOING TO DIE). Glyn Maxwell is currently adapting Umberto Eco's THE NAME OF THE ROSE for Moving Pictures Theatre Company. He lives in London, England.

Rick Barot has published two books of poems with Sarabande Books: THE DARKER FALL (2002) and WANT (2008). His poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including Poetry, The Paris Review, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, The New Republic, and Virginia Quarterly Review. He lives in Tacoma, Washington and teaches both in the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and at Pacific Lutheran University.

Lytton Smith was born in Galleywood, England, and lives in New York City, where he is a founding member of Blind Tiger Poetry, a group which aims to find innovative ways to promote contemporary poetry. His book, THE ALL-PURPOSE MAGICAL TENT (Nightboat Books, 2009) was selected by Terrance Hayes for the Nightboat Prize. His chapbook, MONSTER THEORY, was selected by Kevin Young for a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship and published in 2008. His poems and reviews have appeared in American Letters & Commentary, The Atlantic, Bateau, The Believer, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Ninth Letter, Tin House, Verse, and the anthology All That Mighty Heart: London Poems.

Introduction: Sarah Gambito

I opened a melon last night and immigrants spilled out. Let’s make it more specific: I’m in the belly of the beast, if I am me. If there’s a poem within this poem, Sarah Gambito’s poems announce, I’ll kill its lion-honey, egrets on the rim of how you love me. I pray on my American xylophone, she writes, please don’t discover me, it won’t heal anything. I’m sick of pretending everything is a brierpatch hymnal inside the soldier. Like inside the anime. Surely I’m not interchangeable, my shock in the ghost of the guest of my boyfriend. We talk of jasper things in trees, love in love’s seed pod. I know other songs, I’m aggrieved, uninspired and writing my signature—what I’m capable of. With so much fruit, the cellar was confused, its habitat scares it, screaming back until it changes species. With a dream, a kingfisher like a farmtool in your mouth, Sarah Gambito carefully embroiders the sky, the skin, immigration, the radioactive, crawls fixedly over internal laws. Afterall, when God was a cup of coffee, she tells us, sometimes I think the words and daughters are sugar cubes. Are egrets, if I am me.

Photographs -- May 15th, 2009

Sarah Gambito

Solmaz Sharif

Mrigaa Sethi

Sarah Gambito, Mrigaa Sethi, and Solmaz Sharif

Thursday, May 14th 2009 @ 7:00 PM

Pacific Standard Bar
82 Fourth Avenue
Brooklyn, NY
(between St. Marks and Bergen Streets)

http://chinmusicpoetry.blogspot.com
email: chinmusicpoetry@gmail.com

Please join us for the next evening of Chin Music, the Pacific Standard Poetry Reading Series. On May 14th, we are excited to feature three excellent poets: Sarah Gambito, Mrigaa Sethi, and Solmaz Sharif. Other writers to be featured in Chin Music this season include Glyn Maxwell, Major Jackson, Kevin Goodan, Dan Albergotti, Lytton Smith, Oni Buchanan, Paige Starzinger, Blue Chevigny, and David Baker. Series curated by Colin Cheney.

Please note our earlier reading time of 7:00PM.

Located on Fourth Avenue in downtown Brooklyn, near the Atlantic/Pacific subway hub, Pacific Standard is a literary bar serving up eighteen microbrews on tap and cask (including both West Coast and local breweries), fine wines and liquors, and tasty snacks like chips and salsa, and meat and cheese plates.

FEATURED WRITERS

Sarah Gambito is the author of the poetry collections MATADORA (Alice James Books) and DELIVERED (Persea Books). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Iowa Review, The Antioch Review, Denver Quarterly, The New Republic, Field, Quarterly West, Fence and other journals. She teaches at Fordham University, and is co-founder of Kundiman, a non-profit organization that promotes Asian American poetry.

Mrigaa Sethi was born in Delhi, raised in Thailand, and now teaches creative writing, literature, and composition in New York City. In 2007 she was a winner of an Amy Award through Poets and Writers for New York women under thirty. Her work appears in Gauge, Folio, and Seneca Review.

Born in exile, Solmaz Sharif completed majors in Sociology and Women of Color Writers at U.C. Berkeley. While there, she studied and taught with June Jordan’s Poetry for the People. She holds an MFA from New York University's Creative Writing program, where she taught creative writing and was a Goldwater Fellow. She currently lives in New York City.

Photographs -- April 30th, 2009

Martin Rock

Rebecca Keith

Jee Leong Koh

Jee Leong Koh, Rebecca Keith and Martin Rock

Thursday, April 30th 2009 @ 7:00 PM

Pacific Standard Bar
82 Fourth Avenue
Brooklyn, NY
(between St. Marks and Bergen Streets)

http://www.pacificstandardbrooklyn.com

Please join us for the next evening of Chin Music, the Pacific Standard Poetry Reading Series. On April 30th, we are excited to feature three excellent poets: Jee Leong Koh, Rebecca Keith, and
Martin Rock.

FEATURED WRITERS

Jee Leong Koh is the author of EQUAL TO THE EARTH and PAYDAY LOANS (both from Poets Wear Prada Press). His poetry has appeared in Best New Poets 2007, and Best Gay Poetry 2008, and has also been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Born in Singapore, he now lives in New York City, and blogs at Song of a Reformed Headhunter (http://jeeleong.blogspot.com).

Rebecca Keith holds an MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. She has received honors from the Atlantic Monthly and BOMB Magazine and was a finalist for the 2008 Laurel Review/GreenTower Press Midwest Chapbook Series Award. Her work has appeared most recently in The Laurel Review and Storyscape Journal. She is a founder and curator of the Mixer reading series in New York City.

Martin Rock is an MFA candidate at New York University, where he is a Starworks fellow and soon to be Editor in Chief of Washington Square Review. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in NANO Fiction, 13th Warrior Review, At-Large, and Mississippi Review. After living for four years in Japan, he now resides in Brooklyn.

Introduction: Donna Masini

Then a blackout—we can’t see it yet—it’s daytime. But weren’t we amazed? Like a misguided dragonfly driving into the brick, Donna Masini’s poems auger and awl their way into us. Fiction & luster, I want them both, she tells us: his arm, his arm. Stupid, lusting, plunging—weren’t we imagining? What were we imagining? She could see herself layered with pages, the black print across her body—it’s touching really, what one stranger will do for another. This man in the snow (she saw him) peeling an orange, peeling the white shreds from the fruit like the organs under the plastic page in (she hadn’t seen this yet) Grey’s Anatomy, or The Beatles’ White Album, Joni Mitchell’s Blue, face half gone. Annunciations, inky diffusions—all year I’ve been watching myself flicker, unsure. And now the priest leans into the screen, your father moves the nativity to the coffee table. Donna Masini’s poems are a natural history of incarnation & grave, of being afraid of the small things, delphiniums, of thinking about sex. Not much lost—what I thought were birds was the Body of Christ I loved to hold in my mouth. The voice that makes him luster. Donna Masini.

James Hoch, Donna Masini, and Robert Ostrom

Thursday, April 9th @ 7:00pm

James Hoch’s most recent collection of poems, MISCREANTS, was published by W.W. Norton and Co. His poems have appeared in Slate, Virginia Quarterly Review, New England Review, Ninth Letter, Pleiades, Black Warrior, Gettysburg, Five Fingers, and other magazines. His first book, A PARADE OF HANDS, won the Gerald Cable Book Award, and he was recently awarded a National Endowment for the Arts grant. Hoch teaches at Ramapo College and splits his time between New Jersey and Seattle, Washington.

Donna Masini is the author of two collections of poems—TURNING TO FICTION ( W.W. Norton and Co. 2004), and THAT KIND OF DANGER (Beacon Press, 1994), which was selected by Mona Van Duyn to win the Barnard Women Poet's Prize—and a novel, ABOUT YVONNE, (WW Norton and Co. 1998). Her poems have appeared in journals and anthologies including American Poetry Review, Open City, TriQuarterly, the Paris Review, KGB BAR Book of Poems, Parnassus, Boulevard, and Lyric. She is an Associate Professor of English at Hunter College where she teaches in the MFA Creative Writing program. She lives in New York City and is currently at work on a novel.

Rob Ostrom’s chapbook, TO SHOW THE LIVING, was published by the New York Center for Book Arts. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in 42Opus, Glitterpony, Drunken Boat, The Helen Burns Poetry Anthology, and elsewhere. He is from Jamestown, NY and lives in
Brooklyn.

Sophie Cabot Black, Sean Singer, and Camille Rankine

Thursday, March 26th @ 7:00 PM

Chin Music Featured Writers

Sophie Cabot Black is the author of THE DESCENT (2004) and THE MISUNDERSTANDING OF NATURE (1994), both published by Graywolf Press. Her poems have appeared in publications such as The Atlantic Monthly, Boston Review, The Paris Review, Poetry, Fence, APR, Bomb, and The New Republic. She lives in New York City and Connecticut.

Sean Singer’s first book, DISCOGRAPHY, won the 2001 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, selected by W.S. Merwin, and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. He is also the recipient of an artists’ grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council
and a 2005 Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives n New York City.

Camille Rankine received her MFA in poetry from Columbia University. Her poetry has appeared in Diagram and POOL: A Journal of Poetry. She lives in New York City and works as the Program and Communications Coordinator at Cave Canem Foundation, an organization committed to cultivating the artistic and professional growth of African American poets.

Introduction: Cecily Parks

Did I mention the touch? Happiness, I mean: plant your wing beat in my sleep—Buffalo-, goose-, and bearberries. Such an odd-berried cobbler in the oven are Cecily Parks’ poems of the earth’s jurisdictions, all the turnings inside. Here calf, here lamb, here a wish for a garden, to garden, be gardened. After tabulations of climates, soils, wyoming’s thrall, I began to forget, am shot through with field. I am waiting then, to serve the undone: astral, petal, not bad, but wayward. To be the next verse, the hole the shovel blade sings to. Self portrait as cow skull flush with lupine, self portrait as perch swirling in the parlor. I am the most benign unknown: slate length essays, honeysuckle’s clockwise, spine seam, jaw knot. Dear Aleotory, Dear Magnitude, the jam jar waiting for weed blooms in a waiting house like mine. Each a calligraphic constellation, Cecily Parks poems wait to serve the undone, fumble for a syntax to utter the tameness, the variations of beast and lover that are the earth. Lost here, she says, get tired of loneliness. Were I loved, I would be braver. Did I mention the touch? Garden, shake me something fierce. Cecily Parks.

Lewis Warsh, Cecily Parks, and Zachary Sussman

Thursday, March 12 @ 7:00pm

Chin Music Featured Poets

Lewis Warsh is the author of numerous books of poetry, fiction and autobiography, including THE ORIGIN OF THE WORLD, TOUCH OF THE WHIP, AVENUE OF ESCAPE and TED’S FAVORITE SKIRT. He is co-editor of THE ANGEL HAIR ANTHOLOGY, editor and publisher of United Artists Books, and director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Long Island University in Brooklyn. A new book, INSEPARABLE: POEMS 1995-2005, was published by Granary Books in 2008.

Cecily Parks is the author of FIELD FOLLY SNOW (University of Georgia Press/VQR Poetry Series, 2008) and the chapbook COLD WORK (Poetry Society of America, 2005). She is a PhD candidate in English at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she is working on a dissertation about swamps and American literature.

Zachary Sussman is the host and creator of the OnEarth Magazine poetry podcast, a publication of the Natural Resources Defense Council. In addition to serving as Poetry Editor for Small Anchor Press, he works as the Coordinator of New York University’s Graduate Program in Creative Writing. He lives in Brooklyn.

Introduction: Jason Myers

In Rothko’s Seagram series, I could hear her, the whale swum up the Thames. But I cannot keep orchids and I want to give away the wind. Jason Myers has made America a mix-tape dubbed from a book she had made him out of poems he wrote to find her. A crane made of clay album, a rock shrimp with tarragon album. A thumbnail sketch, a jeweler’s stone—how a farmer stumbles on the terra cotta soldiers of an underworld, but already my heart was stray from yours. “Halloo halloo,” sings Grant Green, “golden rod and grass,” sings Richard Serra. The cider is about to turn and you must recognize, once more, that which surpasses all recognition. What Shakespeare might make of Hussein and the Bushes. How god pauses and passes on. A mix tape for the long drive out of the deep south, for being spun with joy and cold, for a city of ghosts & O the taste of all of her, America. America, like many affairs ours began in the backseat & I try to remember the meals we shared. Olive oil gelato with a pinch of salt? It is so hard to be true. Astonishment, reverence dubbed to a cassette for you to keep in your glove compartment, like Jonah in the belly of the whale up the Thames, gasping, waiting. Yes. Something tells me the eagle is a museum of wind. Yes. Halloo, halloo. Jason Myers.

Nick Laird, Jason Myers, and Austin LaGrone

Thursday, February 26 @ 7:00pm

Chin Music Featured Poets

Born in Co. Tyrone, Northern Ireland in 1975, Nick Laird has received many awards for his fiction and poetry, including the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Ireland Chair of Poetry Award and the Betty Trask Prize. His most recent collection, ON PURPOSE, published by W.W. Norton in 2008, received a Somerset Maugham award and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. His new novel, GLOVER’S MISTAKE, will be published by Viking Penguin in August.

Jason Myers was born in a small town. He has nothing against a big town. He went to Bennington College in Vermont where he was named Catherine Osgood Foster Scholar by poet Mary Oliver. This fall he will become a Master of Divinity student at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University. His writing has appeared in Agni, Euphony, The Paris Review, Poet Lore, Tin House, and West Branch. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

Born and raised in Louisiana, Austin LaGrone put himself through school bolting four hundred and fifty transmissions a day to Chevy S-10 engine blocks. He hiked the Annapurna Circuit in flip-flops before earning his master's degree in Liberal Arts at St. John's College in Annapolis. His poems have recently appeared in Brilliant Corners. He currently lives in Brooklyn and is pursuing an M.F.A. in Creative Writing at New York University.