Saturday, June 1: Anne Lesley Selcer & Tom Comitta

In celebration of Anne Lesley Selcer’s new book

Blank Sign Book: Eleven Essays on Beauty, Invisibility, Formlessness, Abjection, and Political Emotion

Published by Wolfman Books

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Saturday, June 1

Doors 7:30pm

Event 8pm

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Blank Sign Book is a collection of essays on art, artists, beauty, and politics by the poet and art writer, Anne Lesley Selcer. A selection of Selcer’s ranging expositions and guided interrogations into the communicative gestures of art, the book navigates the maelstrom of image-rich contemporary culture through the work of Ana Mendieta, The Otolith Group, Juliana Huxtable, Dolores Dorantes, Janet Cardiff, Ragnar Kjartansson, and more.

Rooted in the work of feminist, queer, and postcolonial cultural theorists from Susan Sontag to Saidiya Hartman to Lisa Robertson and Micha Cárdenas, the essays consider protest, Afro-pessimism, gentrification, spectacle, trauma, beauty, surveillance, gender, the agora, and the artist's place in political change. They explore questions of beauty’s relevance to revolt, resonance as a modality of undermining power, and art’s capacity to reflect and subvert communal and generational trauma. With lyricism, incisive clarity and a deep commitment to the power of art and artists as a vehicle for experimental advocacy and radical insight, Blank Sign Book displays Selcer’s capacious and assiduous grasp as an art writer and cultural thinker to be read for decades to come.

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Tom Comitta is the author of ◯ (Ugly Ducking Presse), Airport Novella (Troll Thread) and First Thought Worst Thought: Collected Books 2011-2014 (Gauss PDF), a digital and print archive of the 40 books he produced in four years. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in BOMB, Fence, BAX 2020 and New American Writing, with two poems in The New Concrete (Hayward Publishing), an international anthology surveying the “rise of concrete poetry in the digital age.” He is currently at work on a collage novel, The Nature Book.

May 25: Zachary Oberzan's The Great Pretender

This Saturday night, 951 Chung King Road once again opens its doors and lends its venue to a new screening series programmed by Nick Toti. This installment will feature the U.S. premiere of "the greatest movie that never should have been made by the greatest filmmaker you've never heard of": Zachary Oberzan's The Great Pretender.

The Great Pretender could be conveniently described as an unauthorized remake of Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-up, but it is actually much, much more than that: an examination of the absurdities of fame and creativity, a concert by an Elvis impersonator, and a guided meditation through the dark corner's of Oberzan's neuroses. It is the type of movie that descriptions can do no justice, so come witness it for yourself!

 

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Saturday, May 25th, 2019

Doors open at 7:30pm; screening begins at 8:00pm

951 Chung King Rd, Los Angeles, CA

Free and open to all

Saturday, May 18: Adam Tedesco, Amie Zimmerman, Natalie Graham & Librecht Baker

The Poetic Research Bureau presents...

ADAM TEDESCO
AMIE ZIMMERMAN
NATALIE GRAHAM
& LIBRECHT BAKER

Saturday, May 18 2019

Doors 7:30pm
Reading 8pm

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Poet and video artist Adam Tedesco is a founding editor of REALITY BEACH, a journal of new poetics. His video work has been screened at MoMA PS1, &Now: A Festival of Innovative Writing, No Nation Gallery, and the New Hampshire Poetry Festival, among other venues. His poetry, essays, and interviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Fanzine, Fence, Gramma, jubilat, Laurel Review, Powderkeg, Prelude, and elsewhere. He is the author of several chapbooks, most recently ABLAZA (Lithic Press, 2017), ISO 8601:2004 (Really Serious Literature, 2018), and Misrule (Ursus Americanus, 2019). His first full-length poetry collection, Mary Oliver, was published by Lithic Press in February.

Amie Zimmerman lives in Portland, Oregon. Her work has been published in Sixth Finch, DIAGRAM, West Branch, Salt Hill, and Puerto del Sol, among others. She has two chapbooks, Oyster (Reality Beach) and Compliance (Essay Press), is events coordinator for YesYes Books, and runs the reading series "family portrait."

A native of Gainesville, Florida, Natalie Graham earned her M.F.A. in Creative Writing at the University of Florida and Ph.D. in American Studies at Michigan State University. Her poems have appeared in Callaloo, New England Review, Valley Voices: A Literary Review, and Southern Humanities Review; and her articles have appeared in The Journal of Popular Culture and Transition. She is a Cave Canem fellow and associate professor of African American Studies at California State University, Fullerton. BEGIN WITH A FAILED BODY, her first full-length collection of poems, won the 2016 Cave Canem Poetry Prize.

librecht baker is the author of vetiver (Finishing Line Press), an English Professor, and a Sundress Publications' Assistant Editor. She's part of The Vagrancy’s 2018-2019 Playwrights’ Group and was part of the Eastside Queer Stories Festival 2019. baker has attended Ragdale, VONA/Voices, and Lambda Literary Writer’s Retreat. She has a MFA from Goddard College. Her poetry appears in Solace: Writing Refuge, & LGBTQ Women of Color, Bone Bouquet (Issue 8.1), Sinister Wisdom 107 - Black Lesbians: We are the Revolution!, Writing the Walls Down: A Convergence of LGBTQ Voices, and other publications. baker's full-length play, “Taciturn Beings,” will received a stage reading on May 18th at 4 PM, in Los Angeles, as part of Vagrancy Theatre’s BLOSSOMING: A N

Friday, May 10th: Zhu Zhu: Readings from The Wild Great Wall

Chinese poet Zhu Zhu joins the Poetic Research Bureau in LA’s Chinatown for an evening of modernist poetry, drawn from his latest book, The Wild Great Wall. 

In the words of author Srikanth Reddy, The Wild Great Wall “will introduce American readers to a singular poetic consciousness adrift in modernity.”

Translated from the Chinese by Dong Li. 

This event is free and open to the public. Doors open at 7:30.