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