Published: November 11, 2022; Aithor: Julia Sonrisa
Address: 180 Orchard Street, New York, NY 10002, United States
Phone: +1 212-546-7536
Web: https://www.ptknitwear.com/P&T Knitwear is pleased to welcome Imogen Xtian smith, Kamden Ishmael Hillard, Chia-Lun Chang and Kay Gabriel for a joint reading from their most recent poetry collections: stemmy things, MissSettl, Prescribee, & A Queen in Bucks County!
This flirty collection traces unruly paths of becoming; its sprawling poems build towards an expansive world celebrating fluidity while casting a critical lens on state power, ecological precarity, and the yearning for queer utopia on stolen land. Referencing lineages of poets, musicians, workers, and neighbors, as well as conversations between lovers and friends, stemmy things is a vision unraveling, breaking open to make space for glimmering while reckoning with the body’s multiple contexts. Layered, lush, and lavish, these poems offer up tangling, blossoming desire.?
Togetherness sends out sparks from its electric surface, radiating energy and verve from within its deep and steady emotional core: stories of the poet’s immigrant childhood spent in their family’s Chinese restaurant, culminating in a deportation battle against the State. These narrative threads weave together monologue, soaring lyric descants, and document, taking the positions of apostrophe, biography, and soulful plaint to stage a vibrant and daring performance in which drag is formalism and formalism is a drag—at once campy and sincere, queer, tender, and winking.
Reading Prescribee is not dissimilar to the experience of coming across a recipe in a vintage American cookbook: it transforms the familiar ingredients of contemporary life into an uncanny, discomfiting concoction. Wielding English as a foreign language and medium, Chang redefines the history of Taiwan and captures the alienation of the immigrant experience with a startlingly original voice. Flouting tired expectations of race, gender, nationality, and citizen status, Prescribee is as provocative as it is perceptive, as playful as it is sobering.
In A Queen in Bucks County, our protagonist Turner, who both is and is not the writer, makes his pleasurable way through miserable space. Men “buy him things,” lovers drive across state lines, users down volatile cocktails to see what happens, landlords turn tenants out, and Turner writes poetic tracts to friends about it. Part pornography, part novel, all love letter, A Queen in Bucks County is an experiment in turning language upside down to see what falls out.
Pre-order your signed copies of stemmy things /MissSettl/ Prescribee / A Queen in Bucks County
Available to ship to most places
Chia-Lin Chang is the author of Prescribee (2022), winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize, and two chapbooks, An Alien Well-Tamed (Belladonna*, 2022) and One Day We Become Whites (No, Dear, 2016). She has received support from Jerome Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Tofte Lake Center, Poets House, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (Sarah Verdone Writing Award 2022, Governors Island Arts Center residency 2021; Process Space 2017) among others. Chia-Lun teaches contemporary Taiwanese poetry and fiction at the Brooklyn Public Library. Born and raised in New Taipei City, Taiwan, she lives in Brooklyn.
Kay Gabriel is a poet and essayist. Andrea Abi-Karam, co-edited We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat, 2020). She’s the author of Kissing Other People or the House of Fame (Rosa Press, 2021) and A Queen in Bucks County (Nightboat Books, 2022).
Kamden Hilliard is a non-binary poet, educator, and scholar. They are the author of MissSettl (2022). They are also the author of three chapbooks of poetry: distress tolerance (2016), perceived distance from impact (2017), and henceforth: a travel poetic (2019). Kamden also serves as a board member at VIDA: Women In Literary Arts, a reader at Flypaper Lit, and was the 2020-2022 Anisfield-Wolf Fellowship in Publishing and Writing at The Cleveland State University Poetry Center.
Imogen Xtian Smith is a poet & performer whose work has appeared in Apogee, Peach Mag, The Rumpus, & Tagvverk, as well as We, Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics. A co-recipient of Nightboat’s First Book Award, their debut collection, stemmy things, drops in 2022 (Nightboat Books). imogen lives & works on Lenape lands / in NYC.
Time: 7:00 PM — 8:00 PM EST
Free!
Detailed information and discussion of the event.