Carlos Soto-Román, Omar Pimienta & Román Luján

CARLOS SOTO-ROMÁN
OMAR PIMIENTA
& ROMÁN LUJÁN

Friday, January 29
7:30pm

Poetic Research Bureau
951 Chung King Rd.
Los Angeles, CA 
90012

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Carlos Soto-Román is a pharmacist, poet, and translator. He holds a Master of Bioethics from the University of Pennsylvania. In Chile, he has published: La Marcha de los Quiltros (1999), Haikú Minero (2007) and Cambio y Fuera (2009). In the United States: Philadelphia’s Notebooks (Otoliths, 2011), Chile Project: [Re-Classified] (Gauss PDF, 2013), The Exit Strategy (Belladonna, 2014) and Alternative Set of Procedures (Corollary Press, 2014). His work can be found in Crux Desperationis, Summer’s Stock, P-Queue, Capitalism Nature Socialism, Where Eagles Dare, Mandorla, Asphodel, Hold and The American Poetry Review. He is a MacDowell Fellow and has been awarded with scholarships from the Chilean Council for Culture and the Arts.

Omar Pimienta is an interdisciplinary artist and writer who lives and works in the San Diego / Tijuana border region. His artistic practice examines questions of identity, trans-nationality, emergency poetics, sociopolitical landscapes and memory. He received his MFA in Visual Arts from the University of California, San Diego in 2010 and he is currently a PhD candidate of Literature at UCSD. His work has been presented in galleries, museums and cultural centers in U.S, México, Germany, Spain, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Germany and Denmark. He has published three books of poetry, including Escribo desde Aquí for which he has been awarded the Emilio Prado 10th International Publication prize from the Centro Cultural Generación del 27 Malaga Spain in 2009.

Román Luján, a Mexican poet and literary translator based in Los Angeles, is the author of Instrucciones para hacerse el valiente (2000), Aspa Viento (2003, artist book in collaboration with painter Jordi Boldó), Deshuesadero (2006) and Drâstel (2010). Coeditor of two anthologies of Mexican poetry, his work has appeared in Zur Dos: Última poesía latinoamericana (2004) and Malditos Latinos, Malditos Sudacas: Poesía Iberoamericana Made in USA (2009) among other anthologies. Translations of his poetry have appeared in Jacket2, Aufgabe, Mandorla, Crux Desperationis and Matter, among other journals. He is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Hearts of Palm Reading Palace: Cathy Linh Che, Melissa R. Sipin, & Harmony Holiday

Dear Friends, Friends of Some Friends, Friends of No Ones Friends, 

Please join us to ring in the forever New Year for the fourth Hearts Of Palm Reading Palace event with:

Cathy Linh Che
Melissa R. Sipin
Harmony Holiday

Like always, there will be a plethora of things to chomp like fruits, hopia, hearts of palm, and some kind of cake. This evening will be bomb from all kinds of angles. We hope to see you there! 

Poetic Research Bureau
951 Chung King Road
Chinatown, Los Angeles
Saturday January 16, 2016 
7:30pm 

Cathy Linh Che is the author of Split (Alice James Books), winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. Having lived in Brooklyn on and off since 2007, she's happy to be returning to Los Angeles, city of her birth.

www.cathylinhche.com

Nicknamed "small but terrible" by her lola, Melissa R. Sipin was born and raised in Carson, CA. She won Glimmer Train's Fiction Open and the Washington Square Review's Flash Fiction Prize, and co-edited Kuwento: Lost Things (Carayan Press 2014). Her work is in Guernica, VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, and PEN American Center, among others. As the Poets & Writers McCrindle Fellow in Los Angeles, she is hard at work on a short story collection and novel.

www.msipin.com

HARMONY HOLIDAY is a poet, dancer, and archivist, mythscientist and the author of Negro League Baseball (Fence, 2011), Go Find Your Father / A Famous Blues (Ricochet, 2014), and Hollywood Forever (forthcoming from Fence, fall 2015). She was the winner of a 2013 Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and she curates the Afrosonics archive, a collection of rare and out-of print LPs and soundbites featuring poetry and poetics from throughout the African Diaspora, both analog at Columbia University's music library and digitally as a Tumblr. Her record label, Mythscience Records, devoted to making titles from the archive available to the public by way of reissues in both vinyl and digital formats, is forthcoming, starting with the reissue of Amiri Baraka's Black Spirits: New Voices in African American Literature LP.

Sunday, December 6: @SEA #3, "PORTRAITS"

The third edition of @SEA, a new monthly series at the Poetic Research Bureau, takes place this Sunday afternoon, December 6th.

This month’s one-word theme is “portraits” and explores portraiture in myriad dimensions – human, object, landscape, lyric, documentary – through video, 16mm film, essay, criticism and poetry.

Here’s this month’s amazing lineup:

“PORTRAITS” – Sunday 1pm @ the PRB

1.00  Doors open

1.30  SCREENING: Solomon Turner (LA), video, Ambassador

1:45  READING: Linda Norton (Oakland), selections from recent collages, poems, essays

2:15  LECTURE: Jeff Solomon (LA), on mid-century mass-market portraits of Truman Capote

2:45  PROJECTION: Nora Sweeney (LA), selection of recent 16mm films

Event is free. Refreshments served.

951 Chung King Rd, LA, CA 90012

Participants:

Solomon Turner is an LA based filmmaker. He received his MFA in Film/Video from California Institute of the Arts and his BA in Cinema Studies from Oberlin College. He is obsessed with thinking about the future, technology and life on on other planets.

Linda Norton’s debut collection of poetry and prose, The Public Gardens: Poems and History (2011, Pressed Wafer), featuring an introduction by Fanny Howe, was a finalist for an LA Times Book Prize and was also a Kenyon Review notable book in 2012. Norton in also the author of a chapbook, Hesitation Kit (EtherDome, 2007) and is the recipient of a 2014 Creative Work Fund grant for a project about incarceration, poetry, and visual art. Her work has been featured in the anthologies New California Writing; Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here; and As If It Fell from the Sun. Norton’s visual collages have appeared on the covers of books by Julie Carr, Claudia Rankine, and Stacy Szymaszek, in a recent issue of Lapham's Quarterly, and on the cover of the anthology As If It Fell from the Sun. Her series of 48 collages (called Dark White) was exhibited in 2014 at the Dock in Carrick-on-Shannon, Ireland, with subsidy from the US Embassy in Dublin. In 2015 she visited Ireland again, where she worked on a memoir and cultural history called Dark White. She is currently completing a manuscript of poems called COLORATURA. 

Jeff Solomon’s first book, Fabulous Potency: Truman Capote and Gertrude Stein is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press in 2016.  His article “Capote and the Trillings: Homophobia and Literary Culture at Mid-Century” won the 2009 Andrew J. Kappel Prize for Best Article of the Year in Twentieth-Century Literature, and his short story “Best Friend” was the lead story in Best Gay Stories 2009 [Lethe Press].  He holds an M.F.A. in fiction from UC-Irvine and a doctorate in English from the University of Southern California, where he is a Lecturer. Solomon will discuss early mass-market portraits of Truman Capote, and how these both broadcast his homosexuality and shielded him from the homophobia that hurt the careers of other gay male mid-century writers.

Nora Sweeney is a documentary filmmaker and photographer based in Los Angeles. Born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, she received her B.A. from Oberlin College and M.F.A. in Film/Video from CalArts. She taught documentary filmmaking and photography for two years at a women's college in Madurai, India through a fellowship from Oberlin Shansi. She continues to teach filmmaking in youth media education programs as well as work as a photographer, videographer, and editor. Her films have been screened at REDCAT (Los Angeles), Antimatter (Victoria), Chicago Underground Film Festival, Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, Athens International Film + Video Festival, and in the Black Maria Film and Video Festival, where Something Like Whales won a Jury's Choice Award (1st Prize).

Saturday, December 5, 7:30pm: Sandra & Ben Doller

Come see the hearts and palms of Ben & Sandra Doller, along with their little Wild One. Both will be reading together at the 3rd Hearts of Palm at Poetic Research Bureau Saturday night. There will be cans of hearts of palm and maybe a cake. There might even be another UFO siting like the one a few weeks ago. You never know. Please join us!

Ben Doller’s most recent book is Fauxhawk from Wesleyan; Sandra Doller’s most recent book is Leave Your Body Behind from Les Figues; together their collaborative book The Yesterday Project is soon to be recent from Sidebrow. She/He/They live in San Diego and Joshua Tree with a baby and a pit bull named Wild Alphabet and Kiki Smith. They teach for California.

 * * * 

Reading begins at 7:30pm. 

Poetic Research Bureau

951 Chung King Road

Chinatown, Los Angeles

 

The Poetic Research Bureau presents...

CHRISTIAN BÖK
& GENEVA CHAO

Monday, November 23
7:30pm

Poetic Research Bureau
951 Chung King Rd.
Los Angeles, CA 
90012

Copies of Christian Bök's newest book The Xenotext: Book 1 will be available for sale at the event.
~

Christian Bök is the author of Crystallography (Coach House Press, 1994), a ’pataphysical encyclopedia nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award for Best Poetic Debut, and ’Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science (Northwestern University Press, 2001). His book Eunoia won the 2002 Griffin Poetry Prize. Bök has created artificial languages for Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley’s Amazon. His conceptual artwork has appeared at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York City as part of the exhibit Poetry Plastique. He currently teaches at the University of Calgary. His newest book, The Xenotext: Book 1 is just out from Coach House Books.

Geneva Chao writes and translates bilingually. Her English translations of Nicolas Tardy's Encrusted on the Living (with François Luong) and Gérard Cartier's Tristran are forthcoming in 2015 from [lx] press and her first full-length collection, one of us is wave one of us is shore, will be published by Otis Books|Seismicity Editions in 2016.

Sunday, November 8: @SEA #2, "CONVERSION"

 

The second edition of @SEA, a new monthly series at the Poetic Research Bureau, takes place this Sunday afternoon, November 8. This month’s one-word theme is “conversion” and explores changes of state, form and function, material and otherwise.

Here’s the excellent lineup:

“CONVERSION” – Sunday 1pm @ the PRB

1.00  Doors open

1.30  READING: Jan Wagner (Berlin), selected poems both in German and the English translation

2.00  SCREENING: Eve Luckring (LA), The Junicho Video-Renku Book, twelve short "twelve-tone" video-poems based on the 17th century Japanese poetic form of renku

2.30  PRESENTATION: Guy Bennett (LA), View Source, a work of code poetry (or poetry in code)

3.00  PERFORMANCE: Carmina Escobar (Mexico City), some selections from John Cage's Sixty-Two Mesostics re Merce Cunningham

Event is free. Refreshments served.

951 Chung King Rd, LA, CA 90012

Participants:

Guy Bennett is the author of several collections of poetry, various works of non-poetry, and numerous translations. Recent publications include View Source, the edition / translation of Giovanna Sandri’s only fragments found: selected poems, 1969–1998, and a translation of Mohammed Dib’s Tlemcen or Places of Writing. His writing has been featured in magazines and anthologies in the U.S. and abroad, and presented in poetry and arts festivals internationally. Publisher of Mindmade Books and co-editor of Seismicity Editions, he lives in Los Angeles and teaches at Otis College of Art and Design.

Carmina Escobar is a vocalist, sound, and intermedia artist from Mexico City whose work focuses on the interrelationship of physical, social, and memory spaces to the body, voice, and sound. She has been awarded grants by the Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (National Fund for the Arts) of Mexico and the MidAtlantic Arts Foundation and has collaborated on recordings for the labels Abolipop Records (Mexico), Cotton Good Archive (England), Mathka (Poland) y Edge Tone Records (USA).  Escobar performs and presents her work frequently in Mexico and internationally. Currently she is the vocalist and co-artistic director, along with Alexander Bruck and Carlos Iturralde, of [liminar], one of the most innovative experimental new music ensembles in Mexico.

Eve Luckring is a visual artist and poet based in Los Angeles. Her work questions the assumptions—and experiments with the boundaries—that define place, body, and habit. For the past several years, she has been translating traditional Japanese poetic forms into the visual realm to renegotiate the binaries of nature/culture, subject/object, and self/world. Luckring’s videos and installations have been exhibited internationally in both traditional art venues and public spaces. Her poetry has been published in numerous journals and anthologies, including Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years, W. W. Norton & Company and The Disjunctive Dragonfly, A New Approach to English-Language Haiku, Red Moon Press.

Jan Wagner was born 1971 in Hamburg and has been living in Berlin since 1995. Poet, essayist, translator of Anglo-American poetry (Charles Simic, James Tate, Simon Armitage and many others), he has published six poetry collections since 2001, the most recent, Regentonnentonnenvariationen (“Rain Barrel Variations”), winning the prestigious Award of the Leipzig Bookfair (2015), the first poetry collection ever to do so. A Selected Poems 2001-2015 will be published with Hanser Verlag in Spring 2016. With the poet Björn Kuhligk he edited the comprehensive anthology of young German language poetry Lyrik von Jetzt. 74 Stimmen („Poetry of Now. 74 voices“, 2003); a selection of his essays on poetry, Die Sandale des Propheten. Beiläufige Prosa (“The Prophet’s Sandal. Incidental Prose”), was published in 2011. Wagner’s poetry has been translated into thirty languages, also into English (Self-Portrait With a Swarm of Bees. Selected Poems, translated by Iain Galbraith, was published 2015 by Arc, UK). He has received various scholarships (for example 2011 in the German Academy in Rome/Villa Massimo) and literary awards, among them the Anna-Seghers-Award (2004), the Ernst-Meister-Award for Poetry (2005) and the Friedrich-Hölderlin-Preis (2011) and is a member of the German Academy of Language and Literature.

Saturday OCT 24, HEARTS OF PALM: Kenji Liu & Margaret Rhee

Kenji C. Liu's forthcoming poetry collection Map of an Onion is the 2015 national winner of the Hillary Gravendyk Prize. His writing appears in The American Poetry Review, Asian American Literary Review, Barrow Street Journal, CURA, RHINO, Split This Rock's poem of the week series, and several anthologies. A recipient of fellowships from Kundiman, VONA/Voices, Djerassi Resident Artist Program, and Community of Writers at SV, he holds an MA in Cultural Anthropology and Social Transformation.

Margaret Rhee is the author of chapbooks Yellow (Tinfish Press, 2011) and Radio Heart; or, How Robots Fall Out of Love (forthcoming Finishing Line Press, 2015). She co-edited Glitter Tongue: queer and trans love poems and Mixed Blood, a literary journal on race and innovative poetics edited by CS Giscombe. She is the Kathy Acker Fellow at Les Figues Press and an associate editor for Tupelo Press. In 2014, she received her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in ethnic and new media studies, and her BA in English and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. Currently, she is a visiting assistant professor in Women and Gender Studies at the University of Oregon.

Saturday, October 24, 2015
Doors open @ 7:00pm

Reading @ 7:30pm

The Poetic Research Bureau
951 Chung King Rd.
Los Angeles, CA
90012