Saturday twilight poetry!

Pacific Standard Reading Series: The Prequel
Featuring Ciaran Berry, Abby Chew, and Claire Cheney

Saturday, September 29 -- Reading begins promptly at 8:00 PM.

Pacific Standard Bar
82 Fourth Avenue
Brooklyn, NY

http://www.pacificstandardbrooklyn.com./

Directions:

Pacific Standard is located at 82 Fourth Avenue in Park Slope, Brooklyn, between St. Marks and Bergen Streets. It's a short walk from a dizzying array of subway and commuter rail lines at the Atlantic/Pacific station, namely, the 2, 3, 4, 5, D, N, Q, and R, as well as the Long Island Railroad. New York subway map. After you exit the Atlantic/Pacific station, just walk four blocks south on Fourth Avenue to get to our bar. We're not too much longer a walk from the F and G stop at Bergen Street, and are also close to the B61, B63, and B65 bus lines.

Readers:

Ciaran Berry is een jonge dichter die woont op het verlaten platteland van Noord-Ierland. Or maybe that is the other Ciaran Berry, not our scribe of bog-orchid, moth, and death-wish piano moving whose first book, THE SPHERE OF BIRDS, will be released this spring in North America by Southern Illinois State University Press (as the winner Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition) and across the sea by Ireland's renowned Gallery Press. You've read his poems recently in most all your favorite journals: Crazyhorse, the Missouri Review, AGNI, and The Threepenny Review. Hailing originally from the Northwest of Ireland, Mr. Berry currently teaches in the Expository Writing Program at New York University.

Abby Chew, the internets tell us, often visits you in your dreams, asking politely to borrow a cup of sugar, a towel, your dog-eared copy of Richard Hugo. In these dreams, which are her poems full of bears, coyotes, auto-repair and lost gloves, you are reminded of the time when "Oolie threaded his bird-bear-body through the gap between night and morning./ He said the mourner's prayer./ His crow-wings filtered the light —/ His bear claws raked rows into the land." A graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop, she currently teaches in Ohio, where she teaches Quaker children to care for goats that are later asked to become stew. Her dog's name is Alice.

Recent public meeting minutes inform us that the South 48th Street water main from Old Cheney Road to Claire Avenue is nearing construction. Claire Cheney herself recently graduated from Oberlin College, where she won numerous honors for her poetry, and completed a study of the Maine "wild" blueberry industry. She will gladly challenge any New Jersey blueberry farmers to a one-on-one field hockey match, relying on such transmutating lines as "A sarcophagus of light, bearing the inscription of moths and cottonmouths. / Weeding the asparagus patch, dirt on my fingers, a shattered glint of mica— / I lick my thumb." Ms. Cheney lives near the old Baker Chocolate Factory in Massachusetts.