THE BURNING CHAIR

The Burning Chair Readings
Say Why the Hell Not
Whirligig it Like Ya Mean it w/

Dan Hoy, Justin Marks & Chris Salerno
Friday, September 29th, 7:29 PM
@ The Fall Café
307 Smith Street
Between Union & President
Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn
F or G to Carroll

Free, dude.
No outside booze, please.

Dan Hoy lives in Brooklyn and is co-editor of SOFTTARGETS. His work has appeared or is forthcoming injubilat, Octopus, H_NGM_N, Effing, the tiny, CUE: AJournal of Prose Poetry, and elsewhere. His moviecriticism and videos are available on his website,www.sinlechuga.com.

Justin Marks' poems have appeared in The LiteraryReview, MiPoesis, McSweeney's, Typo, Word for/ Word,Can We Have Our Ball Back?, and are forthcoming inH_NGM_N, Fulcrum and the Outside Voices 2008 Anthologyof Younger Poets. His chapbook, You Being You byProxy, is available on Kitchen Press. He is editor ofLIT and lives in NYC.

Christopher Salerno's first book, Whirligig, wasshortlisted for the Walt Whitman Award and wasrecently published by Spuyten Duyvil Publishing House.His poems can be found in such journals as: Verse,LIT, Carolina Quarterly, Colorado Review, Jacket,Jubilat, The Tiny, MiPOesias, New Hampshire Review,Free Verse, Forklift Ohio, Electronic Poetry Review,Barrow Street, River City, and others. Two of hisrecent poems are included in the anthology, The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel and others will appearin the forthcoming Outside Voices anthology. Hecurrently teaches Poetry Writing, American Literature,and First-Year Writing at North Carolina StateUniversity in Raleigh, NC. He blogs atwww.christophersalerno.blogspot.com.

Forthcoming:

At The Fall Cafe:
October 20th Lee Ann Brown, Joanna Fuhrman, & EricaKaufman
October 29th Kazim Ali, Bruce Covey, & JulietPatterson
November 17th Julia Cohen, Mark Lamoureux, & AfricaWayne

At the Pierogi Gallery:
October 21st Adam Clay & Kate Greenstreet

“One Truly Human Act” —Sikkema & Simple Wants

Despite a surface flash, a linguistic rupture that permeates some of the poems (or poetic utterances) that make up CODE OVER CODE, Sikkema's work is a profoundly human one, a searching utterance.

The book begins simply enough, with the controlling consciousness, the center of the vortex, proclaiming, “I wanted everything with you to be nicely round in a square of berry patch,/dirt and sky.” So much of what this book, finally, generates for the reader is initiated here, a revving that spans the length of the collection. Here is urge towards coupled with wariness of; there is a cynicism here that wants the “round” to exist in the “square,” that wants the impossibility of non-conformity within conformity & is still naïve enough to think that, if it can be achieved, there will be a nicety to it all. The book, then, the rest of the poems, are notes from the war, the speaker’s realization that this cannot be—implied syntactically already: I wanted…

If the world view of CODE OVER CODE is “romantic,” if it can be said to aspire to “organic unity,” the project of CODE OVER CODE, what the poems accomplish, can be said to reveal to us an interrogation of that Romantic sensibility & the fact that we live in a world that is openly antagonistic to it. Such simple & lovely & intimate whispers such as “Here is where I am looking at you/in me” have no place in the new mechanisms of poetic language, which use the gears of irony & fear & distrust to spin our selves further & further from real human connections.

Sikkema’s speaker asks “Is there one truly human act left?” The direct answer seems to be no, or at least that it is decidedly not the kind of act we want to be remembered for. Pure animal functioning does not make a human & I stand with Sikkema, chagrined & angry, baffled that we live in an age where poetry that enacts the purer functions of emotion (including, yes, love) is viewed suspiciously.

--Review by . Nate Pritts

The Burning Chair Readings
Invite you, pussycat,
To resign yourself to the luxurious pleasure
Of auricular satisfaction

w/
auricular sensations
from

Thibault Raoult, Sandra Simonds & Maureen Thorson

Friday, September 15th, 7:30 PM
@
The Fall Café
307 Smith Street
Between Union & President
Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn
F/G to Carroll Street

Of course
always
FREE & FUN

www.typomag.com/burningchair

~

Bios:

Thibault Raoult was a Dolin Scholar at the University of Chicago. One of his pieces in Octopus #4 was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He co-edits Coalesce (with Adam Weg), writes songs, paints, cooks, & cleans (sometimes) in the nude (sometimes). Born in Pithiviers, France, raised in Rochester, NY, Thibault will soon move to Providence, RI.

Sandra Simonds is a Phd student in Creative Writing at Florida State University. Her poems have been published in the Colorado Review, Seneca Review, Barrow Street, e, Castagraf, Cannibal, California Quarterly, Ampersand, 3am and others. She edits Wildlife Poetry Magazine.

Maureen Thorson lives in Washington, D.C., where she is sometimes a lawyer. Her work has appeared in numerous tiny chapbooks, some magazines, and often in her head. She is editor, publisher, and janitor of Big Game Books, the smallest press in the world.

Hi.

I need to get in touch with these poets:

Erin Martin
Kenneth Harrison
Peter Milne
Craig Blais
Megan Mercado
Ash Smith


Please help. Email: adam (AT) adamclay.org