I met Mike Lala in March 2012. I was on a short, fragmented reading tour with mutual poet-friend Jeremy Hoevenaar. We three appear'd together on this invigorating nine-poet bill at This Must Be the Place (attach'd to Diner) in Brooklyn. Mike is tall and winter-complected. His poetry was lush and sort of soft-spoken.
A couple months ago, he pitched a cultural-exchange-type two-part reading to Jeremy and me: he and three other New York writers would read with about as many Baltimoreans down here in January. Then in February we'd repeat the line-up in Brooklyn.
In the current poetry climate that qualifies as ambitious. Hopefully after this kind of translocal group reading becomes more common, we'll realize it's obvious.
Big thank you to Russell at the Windup Space for betting on a lit-marathon.
The Brooklyn Side
Mike Lala lives in New York, where he co-curates Fireside Follies and is Assistant Poetry Editor at Washington Square. His work appears or is forthcoming in Fence, The Brooklyn Rail, RHINO 2013, DIAGRAM, Artifice, The Awl, and many others, including the chapbooks Under the Westward Night (Knickerbocker Circus, 2010) and [fire!] ([sic] Press, 2011). mikelala.com.Allyson Paty is the author of The Further Away, a chapbook published by [sic] Press in 2012. Her poems can be found in Tin House, Gulf Coast, DIAGRAM, Denver Quarterly, Harpur Palate, Handsome and Best New Poets 2012. She is co-editor of Singing Saw Press, a fine arts and poetry publisher that will make its debut release this fall.
Eric Nelson is a writer originally from New Jersey. His essays,criticism and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in The Billfold, HTMLGIANT, chimes/SIRENS, Volume 1 Brooklyn and Squawk Back, among others. His short story collection The Silk City Series was published by Knickerbocker Circus in 2010 and “The Walt Whitman House” will be published as a book by the Crumpled Press in January 2013. He lives in Queens, New York.
Matthew Zingg's poetry appears or is forthcoming in Cider Press Review, Blackbird, The Madison Review, and Opium Magazine. He received his MFA in poetry form Adelphi University and lives in Brooklyn.
The Baltimore Side
Jeremy Hoevenaar was born in New Jersey, lived in New York City for nine years, and now lives and attempts to photosynthesize poems in Baltimore. Some work can be found in the Brooklyn Rail, Tantalum Journal, The Recluse, Shifter Magazine, and Forklift, Ohio. He believes applause should be withheld until the end.Bonnie Jones is a writer, improvising musician, and performer working primarily with electronic music and text. She creates improvised and composed text-sound performances that explore the fluidity and function of electronic noise (field recordings, circuit bending) and text (poetry, found, spoken, visual). http://
R.M. O'Brien put out a book called Ant Killer & Other Poems. He's working on a book called All This Was Instantaneous. He fears nothing.
Alicia Puglionesi (part 1)
Alicia Puglionesi (part 2) writes about the history of telepathy, psychic mediums, and nineteenth-century men of science in a scholarly capacity. Her current project, a dictionary of nonverbal communication, may be almost finished. She lives in Baltimore.
Adam Robinson runs Publishing Genius, a small press that publishes poetry and literary fiction and things between those genres. He is the author of two books, Adam Robison and Other Poems and Say Poem.
