Thursday, November 19, 2009

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.

Monday, November 16, 2009

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

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

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.