Please join us on Saturday 9/7 at 4pm EST for the 12th installment of the I Think I Can't Speak For Everyone Here reading series. Featured reader will be Medha Singh.
Email bluejawedsnake@gmail.com for the zoom info and to sign up for the open mic.
Medha Singh is a poet, translator, and editor. She is editor of Berfrois, London. Medha is the winner of the New Writers Award 2023 (Scottish Book Trust). She has published a work of translation, a collection of love letters that she translated from the French, penned by Indian modernist painter Sayed Haider Raza during his time in France, I Will Bring My Time: Love Letters by S.H. Raza (Vadehra Art Gallery, 2020). Her work has appeared in Irish Pages, Bad Lillies, the Robert Graves Review, Interpret, Almost Island, Hotel, 3:AM, Indian Quarterly, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Poetry at Sangam, The Charles River Journal among others. Her work has been anthologized in Singing in the Dark (Penguin, 2020), The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction (Hachette, 2021), Contemporary Indian Poetry by Younger Indians (Sahitya Akademi, 2020), Best Indian Poetry 2018 (RLFPA editions), Divining Dante (Recent Work Press, 2021) Future Library: Contemporary Indian Writing (Red Hen Press, 2022), Converse: Contemporary English Poetry by Indians (Penguin Random House, 2022); The Best Asian Poetry (Kitaab, 2022). Her work has been translated into Hindi, Spanish and French. Her interviews have appeared on the websites of The Pablo Neruda Foundation, Chile; NERObooks, Boston; POV, Denmark, Queen Mob's Teahouse, London and JCAM, Massachusetts. among others. Medha was longlisted for the Toto Funds the Arts Awards (India) in 2019 and 2020. She took her MSc in Creative Writing from the Uni of Edinburgh. Her collection of poems Afterbody is slated to launch in 2025 through Blue Diode Press, Edinburgh.
A few things:
Self published two collections this week.
The first, 57 Letters to Ethan Hawke (or I wanted to stop saying god), is what the title claims.
The second, The Crow's Book of Wrists, is a full-length collection of poems at 193 pages. Cover image by Noah Michael Smock.
Both collections are pay what you want:
via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com)
or Venmo @Barton-Smock-2
or CashApp $BartonSmock
or Zelle bartonsmock@yahoo.com
Include shipment details in payment notes. Request PDF for review or just for the heck of it at bartonsmock@yahoo.com
ALSO, more details on both of the below reading series dates, but please join me next weekend on either Saturday 9/7 or Sunday 9/8, or both, for the next two installments in the I Think I Can't Speak For Everyone Here reading series.
Medha Singh Saturday 9/7 at 4pm
Kristyn Garza and Clara Burghelea Sunday 9/8 at 3pm
Email bluejawedsnake@gmail.com for the zoom link and/or to sign up for the open mic.
Outside The Joy
poems, Ruth Awad
Third Man Books, 2024
I hear, here, a remembered crying. I scrape forgiveness from Ohio to Ohio without a sound. I am in the bearable deepness of Ruth Awad’s latest poetry collection, Outside The Joy, where inquiry is a crop unjudged for the blueness of its yield. I want to tell you where I am that you know I’ve disappeared. Loss is an animal changing search parties in a museum dedicated to exhibiting the same, held differently, gun. This is a verse of hidden performance and dark display. Mother, sister, place, peace. Awad is a poet of the between-life, of old anger and resettled cure, and works this work into one of unmarked resettings to love the world with burnt care. How else, how else. Inside the inside, it shapes answer with response, and whole gods lose muscle to the memory of carried creatures.
~
reflection by Barton Smock
Available now:
The Crow's Book of Wrists
poems, 193 pages
August 2024
Barton Smock
cover image by Noah Michael Smock
Pay what you want
via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com)
or Venmo @Barton-Smock-2
or CashApp $BartonSmock
or Zelle bartonsmock@yahoo.com
Self-published thing that is here for now but might be deleted from yesterday eventually but now is never
~~~
57 Letters to Ethan Hawke
or
I wanted to stop
saying god
~~~
Pay what you want
via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com)
or Venmo @Barton-Smock-2
or CashApp $BartonSmock
or Zelle bartonsmock@yahoo.com
Include shipping details in comments of payment type, etc.
Letter 082724
Dear Ethan Hawke
My children can’t stop thinking about me. My children can’t stop thinking about me. My children can’t stop thinking about me. My children can’t stop thinking about me. My children can’t stop thinking about me. My children can’t stop thinking about me. My children can’t stop thinking about me. My children can’t stop thinking about me. My children can’t stop thinking about me. My children can’t stop thinking about me. My children can’t stop thinking about me. My children can’t stop thinking about me. My children can’t stop thinking about me. My children can’t stop thinking about me. My children can’t stop thinking about me. My children can’t stop thinking about me. My children can’t stop thinking about me. My children can’t stop thinking about me. My children can’t stop thinking about me. My children can’t stop thinking about me. My children can’t stop thinking about me. My children can’t stop thinking about me. My children can’t stop thinking about me. My children can’t stop thinking about me. My children can’t stop thinking about me. My children can’t stop thinking about me. My children can’t stop thinking about me. My children can’t stop thinking about me. My children can’t stop thinking about me. My children can’t stop thinking about me. My children can’t stop thinking about me. My children can’t stop thinking about me. My children can’t stop thinking about me. My children can’t stop thinking about me. My children can’t stop thinking about me. My children can’t stop thinking about me. My children can’t stop thinking about me. My children can’t stop thinking about me. My children can’t stop thinking about me. My children can’t stop thinking about me. My children can’t stop thinking about me. My children can’t stop thinking about me. My children can’t stop thinking about me. My children can’t stop thinking about me. My children can’t stop thinking about me. My children can’t stop thinking about me. My children can’t stop thinking about me. My children can’t stop thinking about me. My children can’t stop thinking about me. My children can’t stop thinking about me. My children can’t stop thinking about me. My children can’t stop thinking about me. My children can’t stop thinking about me. My children can’t stop thinking about me. My children can’t stop thinking about me. My children can’t stop thinking about me.
Letter 082624
Dear Ethan Hawke
I live in a body that sleep hasn’t noticed. A ghost is an angel in love with slow motion. No one touch me. I am dreaming of a poetry book written by Chelsea Peretti. I forget its second name, but its first is Lamb Hat and Crow Perfume. It is being reviewed on tiktok by someone whose mother is unable to recently die. I can’t say on brand without crying. I don’t think it’s healthy of course to dream that celebrities want to secretly write poems. But Chelsea’s poems are perfect. In a houndless south, my god gets high. Stay pretty. Goodbye.
Letter 082524
Dear Ethan Hawke
The nervous systems of angels. A funeral for a cigarette. There are two Ohios. I am still in my singsong violence when my sister throws her youngest in front of an unmoving farm machine. Sometimes a year yanks a room from death. A wasp eats the shadow of a practice wasp. My wrist thinks I’m brushing its teeth and god is the child who survived my dream. I can’t fake sleep long enough to be healed.
Please check out today's reading featuring Adedayo Agarau in the 11th installment of the 'I Think I Can't Speak For Everyone Here' reading series.
Previous readings are here
Letter 082424
Dear Ethan Hawke
I don’t give faith any space because the brain is god’s obstacle. I want to rewatch Wildcat. I thought my last letter would be my last letter. I mentioned my mother, but that’s the half of it. My aunt was young and I had only recently noticed. I have three dreams and drink the same in each. I read my father’s handwriting and it says longing is a paint or it says
long
pain. Weapons-makers don’t read poems and death reads too quickly.
kingsoftrain 