Julian Talamantez Brolaski, CAConrad and Kimberly Lyons

Thursday August 25th, 7pm
Please join us for readings by Julian Talamantez Brolaski, CAConrad and Kimberly Lyons, in conjunction with the exhibition: Shapeshifters, curated by Laurel Sparks

Julian Talamantez Brolaski is the author of gowanus atropolis (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011) and several chapbooks. Advice for Lovers is forthcoming from City Lights in Spring 2012. Brolaski lives in Brooklyn where xe is an editor at Litmus Press and plays country music with Juan and the Pines (http://www.reverbnation.com/juanandthepines ). New work is on the blog hermofwarsaw.

On gowanus atropolis:

"Aspirate all h's and brace to meet Sludgie, 'erstwhal' of the Gowanus, displaced echolocator through a lush verbal wildering of neologisms, hot archaisms, and barbed portmanteaus. Brolaski finds the 'herm' in 'hermunculae' and puts the 'gee' back in 'ambigenuity.' The tongue hasn't sounded this flexed and full since Chaucer lapped up Romance, but these damesires sing instruction with their fishairs: one 'ynvents a grammatical order' so to 'speke englysshe/polymorphously.'"

- Rodney Koeneke

CAConrad is the recipient of a 2011 Pew Fellowship in the Arts. He is the author of A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon (Wave Books, 2012), The Book of Frank (Wave Books, 2010), Advanced Elvis Course (Soft Skull Press, 2009), Deviant Propulsion (Soft Skull Press, 2006), and a collaboration with poet Frank Sherlock titled The City Real and Imagined (Factory School, 2010). The son of white trash asphyxiation, his childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift. Visit him online at http://caconrad.blogspot.com/.

On The Book of Frank:

"CAConrad continually speaks up, speaks out, and speaks frankly, forcing a re-evaluation of culturally pervasive notions about what constitutes normative gender, sexuality, and domesticity. But The Book of Frank is not a polemic, exactly; rather, in a mode reminiscent of John Berryman's Dream Songs, Conrad's sequence of untitled, short poems catalogs via the character of Frank the aftermath of the archetypal events of life: birth, childhood, independence, sexual awaking, marriage, parenting and death. These events are not narrated so much as given an absurdist, allegorical spin - part Kafka, part Jungian imagery, but always clearly articulated...At once charming and frightening, The Book of Frank will certainly take the top of your head off, and it might just replace it with something better."

- Noah Eli Gordon, The Boston Review












Kimberly Lyons is the author of several books of poetry including Phototherapique (Ketalanche Press/Portable Press, 2008) and Saline (Instance Press, 2005). Rouge, a new collection of poems, is forthcoming from Instance Press. Her poems have recently appeared in the magazines New American Writing, Peaches and Bats, and Peepshow/Poetry (online). She is the publisher of Lunar Chandelier Press.

On Saline:

"Again and again, a mindful image is cut out of the background of the world and then placed over another context, while the hollow shape left in the the background is filled in by an image from a new context...In this regard, thought steals back and forth between objects and words, revealing a world of firefly details that comes close to descriptive hallucination...a plethora of bright, irrational bloomings, radiant insights."

- Charles Borkhuis, The Poetry Project Newsletter