It was a real charmer having the likely superstars of this reading around our table!

Jenn McCreary: Let us take the story apart phoneme by phoneme: “recognizing the echoes imposed / upon Persephone–persis meaning / pillage, & phonos, murder–one / realizes there are few accidents” (“In which opposition & sister squares are reconciled.”) – because the words will guide us down parallel paths into the woods where, as we glance across, the object and the visual obstructions form a flickering yet singular body. We encounter the image of one taken, figured, conscripted in language; what is passed through, what appears between two lenses, two pathways of sight, the real or the accepted. As the colons that bookend her titles suggest, Jenn McCreary’s poetry exists in the midst of a process; something squeezed through, momentarily docked, or in a queue, but never static. The essence is rare (to paraphrase gang of four) or better yet “everything is archetypal” as Jenn states in “the calendar of lucky and unlucky days”. Her book’s title – “Ab ovo” or “from the egg” – speaks of metamorphosis, latencies, expectation of a shift, and as Jenn’s sonorous verses illustrate the spirits of bare expression hover always above us: “Gone beyond becoming, we filled / the house with phantoms & called / up monsters from the deep.” (“Haunted Forest”). Please welcome Jenn McCreary. JT

Paul Foster Johnson:  The monstrous city in facets, beautiful, illusory: “I may have synaesthesia / or a memoir eroded by stress / into so many pixels” (“Bronx Safe Room”). Paul’s poems present a tightly mannered, yet multi-dimensional rotating perspective, like cubism in sound, or stark russian futurist monuments in miniature – a steely world slightly tilted, pitchshifted, overexposed. I’ve become fixated on Paul’s work, it’s oddly familiar off-balances and sustained tones that call forth both the urbane and alien, hugging an ever thinning line that runs between the two. As my poet friends will tell you, I’ve often said that I think Paul’s “Palace of Youth” may be a perfect poem, at least a perfect capturing of tonality and image colliding, where the poem is not just seen but felt, under the skin; an experience at which Paul truly excels: “My / favorite said / she was / a lone wolf. I / saw her examine / the ground outside / then break into / a run. She could / not not not stop / adjusting herself / when chucked into / the force field”. These terse, nervy lines displaying logopoeia and melopoeia bound together, doing double time to extend the narrative into the body, linking the limbs, lungs, and nerves together to run a perfect circuit of energy. A chain reaction. An irresistible groove within the glitch. Please give a warm welcome to Paul Foster Johnson.  JT

Mel Nichols: Yearn to be more present.  Not just, ‘In a moment that passes’ but focally, an insulation of the organs of the body that splits the difference through language.  Nichols writes, ‘got lost watching birds at the feeder all day/for what is love but falling//and a telemarketer calls back again.’  I get a little ecstatic, I get a looking over it, the ledge of the self that sees through my own dimensions, like peep holes.  ‘absence becomes presence epiphany/look under the leaves and you will find me,’ Nichols writes in Bicycle Day.  It’s this, an algorithm of real movement, a brief rain that somehow covers my whole face.  Earlier in the year, through the wonderful Jupiter 88 video series, run by CAConrad, Nichols debuted a new poem.  At first, I got an irreverent laugh, but then it grew for about a month.  What might have started as a lark, a Pythonesque ‘Funniest Joke in the World’ didn’t kill me with laughter, but started to fiber out.  ‘I don’t Google anybody else/And when I think about you I Google myself!’  A bit of narcissism mixed with the intimacy that one has with themselves all day long.  The translation to watchwords, and that watchword is Mel Nichols.  ND