Jeff Alessandrelli, Emily Kendal Frey
and Rob Schlegel
Monday, June 23 at 7:30 PM
1719 25th Street
Host: Tim Kahl
Jeff Alessandrelli’s first full-length collection of poetry is the recently published THIS LAST TIME WILL BE THE FIRST (Burnside Review Press, 2014). He is also the author of the little book Erik Satie Watusies His Way Into Sound (Ravenna Press) and three chapbooks, including Don’t Let Me Forget To Feed The Sharks (Poor Claudia). His work has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Pleiades, DIAGRAM, Western Humanities Review, Gulf Coast and Boston Review, among others. The name of his dog is Beckett Long Snout.
Understanding Marcel Duchamp
One morning—I’m not sure why, maybe some type of lack or definition or half-tawdry want—I woke up, saw my neighbor’s bike lying in his driveway and just beat the shit out of it, just pummeled and crumpled and wracked and irrevocably dismantled it until what it was couldn’t even be called “bike” anymore; it was something else entirely. Then I went to work. When I got home that night my neighbor’s driveway was empty, his garage door closed. The bike was gone, all its recognizable parts absent, vanished, shaped into new and heretofore incalculable realities.
(originally appeared in Redivider Vol. 10)
Emily Kendal Frey lives in Portland, Oregon. She is the author of several chapbooks and chapbook collaborations, including FRANCES, AIRPORT, BAGUETTE, and THE NEW PLANET. THE GRIEF PERFORMANCE, her first full-length collection, won the Norman Farber First Book Award from The Poetry Society of America in 2012. Her second collection, SORROW ARROW, is available now from Octopus Books.
excerpt from Sorrow Arrow
My relationship to the unknown is in peril
A field of baking elephant shit
Love makes me permeable
The softest hurricane
Tiny computers are breaking into the clouds
Arrows are raining down
In line for breakfast I fuck the ground
I get inside the mail box and bang around
Information equals empathy erosion
The more you know
You want the boy/girl splayed on the runway
The berry in your pocket melts
Hold still to let it bleed down your leg
Rob Schlegel is the author of The Lesser Fields, winner of the 2009 Colorado Prize for Poetry. His second book, January Machine (Four Way Books, 2014) was selected by Stephen Burt for the Grub Street National Book Prize. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Boston Review, The Iowa Review, Poetry, and The Volta. With Daniel Poppick, he co-edits The Catenary Press. Born and raised in Portland, Oregon, he has lived most recently in Iowa, Montana, and Washington.
from January Machine
In the city’s narrow streets
I pose on my bike as the good doctor
offering jokes to sisters
losing brothers in screens. I pose
as every passing trend,
as meaning living a longer
life in words. I pose as a harlequin
led through the night on a leash by a girl
singing I Am Come America.
I model my death after the dog’s.
I pose in photographs, till everything
I’ve been and everything I’ll ever be
is the faceless man standing in the warm
sea, holding up a late Rothko.
