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.