November 18 at 3 PM in Brooklyn: Jess Arndt, Kathe Burkhart, Frances Richard

Mark your calendars! Next regular QT reading at Dixon Place:
Tues, Nov. 27: Wayne Koestenbaum + Gary Lutz! But first...

QT: Queer Readings at Dixon Place
and the Dumbo Arts Center
present
Text and the City:
A not-entirely-queer reading entirely not at Dixon Place
Sunday, November 18, 2007
3:00 PM
Dumbo Arts Center: 30 Washington Street, Brooklyn

Featuring:
Jess Arndt
Kathe Burkhart
Frances Richard

Right after that (Nov. 18, 5 PM onward), please come hear QT curator Sara Marcus and many other poets read at the EOAGH Release Party @ Unnameable Books, 456 Bergen Street (near Flatbush), Brooklyn, NY.

An avid student of old fashioned mixologies, vast piracy, and assorted buggery, Jess Arndt is attempting to combine the three in her yet to be finished first novel, Shanghaied. Set in Gold Rush San Francisco, the story weaves and staggers through the opium dens, brothels and sailor holes of the Barbary Coast, continuously distracted by the gold-lust and tarts. Having just finished her MFA at Bard College, she trades her time between Brooklyn and a small island off the northwest coast of Washington State. She has most recently been published in Velvet Mafia: Dangerous Queer Fiction, Instant City Journal, Encyclopedia Literary Journal, Bottoms Up! Writing About Sex from Soft Skull Press, and Baby Remember My Name, a new anthology edited by Michelle Tea. She has a short story coming out from Inconvenient Press later this fall, in collaboration with visual artist Xylor Jane.

Kathe Burkhart is an interdisciplinary artist and writer. She is the author of three books of fiction: Between the Lines (Hachette Litteratures, 2006), Deux Poids, Deux Mesures/The Double Standard (Hachette Litteratures, 2002/Participant Press, 2005), and From Under the 8 Ball (LINE, 1985). Her visual art has been widely exhibited nationally and internationally, including the 1993 Venice Biennale, SMAK Museum (Gent, Belgium), Museum of Modern Art, Weatherspoon Museum, and P.S.1. She teaches art and feminist theory at New York University, and divides her time between New York and Amsterdam.

Frances Richard's book of poems, See Through, was published by Four Way Books in 2003. In 2005 she co-curated, with Jeffrey Kastner and Sina Najafi, "Odd Lots: Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark's Fake Estates," an exhibition mounted jointly at the Queens Museum of Art and White Columns Gallery, with a catalogue published by Cabinet Books. Recently awarded a grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital, Ms. Richard writes frequently about contemporary art, teaches at Barnard College and the Rhode Island School of Design, and lives in Brooklyn.

Report back from Billy Merrell + Justin Torres

Thanks to all who packed the room for last night's reading. Here, by request, are the intros again:

Justin Torres:

I didn't intend this exactly, or maybe just not consciously, but this evening's two writers have in common a concern with the complexity of love that lives in captivity, exploring the resonances of being bound or trapped in love. With Billy Merrell, it's romantic exclusivity and marriage, while in the stories of Justin Torres it's childhood, the dizzy encloisterment of living in the child's world, whose terms, rarely explicit but always devastatingly absolute, are set by others--in this case, parents who, while palpably loving, are also by turns childlike themselves and menacing in either their power or their half-absence.

The antics and actions and vignettes of the small boys making sense of the world are entrancing, memorable, plump pie-slices of action and omen. But where I really get lost is in his sentences, these lush furly things in which the breathless, exuberant, overflowed voice of childhood is turned upon the knowledgeable lathe of a writer in command of his craft.

Billy Merrell:

Anyone who is familiar with Billy Merrell in his recent incarnation as mad sonneteer may have wondered whether there's anything he won't put into iambic pentameter. Here, by way of an answer, is a line from his invisible play in verse in progress:

Hey, fuck you. God. I hate this. Drop it. Damn.

This speaks to his interest in the impact of the line and the stress on the stuff of ordinary life and extraordinary love--and in how enormous human events can be boiled down to just a word or two. I think Billy is a didactic poet, which I don't mean in a bad way but notwithstanding his denails there is instruction here, gracefully, sweetly. To a surprising extent for somebody who so overtly pulls from his own experience, his work looks outward. His poems offer morsels to their readers, over and over, like a gardener holding out a bloom or a fruit.

Billy Merrell + Justin Torres: Tuesday, October 23

at Dixon Place, 258 Bowery, 2nd floor, between Houston & Prince
doors at 7 / readings at 7:30

Billy Merrell is the author of Talking in the Dark, a poetry memoir, and was a co-editor for The Full Spectrum: A New Generation of Writing About LGBTQ and Other Identities, which received a 2006 Lambda Literary Award. His work has also appeared in the anthology This is Now: The Best Young Artists and Writers in America. He received his MFA in Poetry from Columbia University and is currently Web Coordinator for Poets.org, the website of the Academy of American Poets.

Justin Torres has published stories in Tin House, The Greensboro Review, and Sleeping Fish. He has a story in the forthcoming issue of Gulf Coast. He is finishing work on his first book.

And later this fall...

Tuesday, November 27
Wayne Koestenbaum + Gary Lutz

Tuesday, December 18
Akilah Oliver + Stacy Szymaszek

Plus:
Sunday, November 18
3 PM
Jess Arndt, Kathe Burkhart, and Frances Richard
in a special edition of
QT: Not-necessarily-queer readings
not anywhere near Dixon Place
at Dumbo Arts Center
in Dumbo, Brooklyn,
in conjunction with the "Sex in the City" exhibition.

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by emailing qt.readings {at} gmail {dot} com.