The Thing in Spring Hosts at the Keene Toadstool
Eileen Myles
Jasmine Dreame Wagner
John-Francis Quiñonez
Noah Burton
Another Earth*
Abbey Meaker*
Saturday, May 20th at 12 pm
The first new collection since Evolution from the prolific poet, activist, and writer Eileen Myles, 'A Working Life' ... captures the measure of life. Whether alone or in a relationship, on city sidewalks or in the country, their lyrics always engage with permanence and mortality, danger and safety, fear and wonder. 'A Working Life' is a book transfixed by the everyday: the 'sweet accumulation' of birds outside a window, a cup of coffee and a slice of pizza, a lover's foot on the bed. These poems arise in the close quarters of air travel, the flashing of a landscape through a train window, or simply in a truck tooling around town, or on foot with a dog in all the places that held us during the pandemic lockdowns
EILEEN MYLEs came to New York from Boston in 1974 to be a poet. Their books include Pathetic Literature, For Now (an essay/talk about writing), Evolution, Afterglow (a dog memoir), I Must Be Living Twice: new and selected poems, and Chelsea Girls. The Trip, their super-8 puppet road film can be seen on YouTube. Eileen has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and was recently elected a member of the American Academy of Arts & Letters. They live in New York and Marfa, TX.
Jasmine Dreame Wagner is an American poet, artist, and musician. She is the author of ON A CLEAR DAY (Ahsahta Press, 2017), RINGS (Kelsey Street Press, 2014) and five chapbooks: Ask (Slope Editions), Listening for Earthquakes (Caketrain, 2012), REWILDING (Ahsahta Press, 2013), Seven Sunsets (The Lettered Streets Press), The Stag (Dancing Girl Press) and an e-chapbook, True Crime (NAP). Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in American Letters & Commentary, Blackbird, Colorado Review, Fence, Guernica, Hyperallergic, New American Writing, Seattle Review, Verse, and in two anthologies: The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral (Ahsahta Press) and Lost and Found: Stories from New York (Mr. Beller's Neighborhood Books).
Keep Your Little Lights Alive explores the Folkloric Nature of how Music intertwines and Opens Windows into our Memory. Sometimes confessional, sometimes playful and fae-like in its elusively - these poems grapple with the pains and gifts of Queer discovery, Gender, Mental Health, and Family. Anchored in a series of Poems Responding Track-by-Track to Kate Bush's Hounds of Love (sometimes directly, sometimes based on what the song unlocks) the book, like the album, is split into two parts. The First - Narrative and free-flowing, The Second - imagines the speaker lost out at sea & astrally visiting and being visited by loved ones.
John-Francis Quiñonez is a Desert Flower & Current Resident of Providence, RI/
a Writer & Multimedia Artist/
Maker of ice creams & tamales/
House Manager of the Columbus Theatre/
Current Resident of the Queer.Archive.Work. project/
has a Forthcoming collection of Poems with
Write Bloody Publishing (‘22)
entitled
“Keep Your Little Lights Alive
(Poems After Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love & Others)”
Noah Burton was born in Kansas and grew up in Virginia. He earned a B.A. in Philosophy from Virginia Commonwealth University, and an MFA in poetry from the University of New Hampshire. Noah is the author of the collections, Clothesline Saga (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2020) and Look Out Animal (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2018). His poems have appeared in PEN America Poetry Series, Sundog Lit, Outlook Springs, among others. Of his work, the poet Tanya Larkin has observed, "Here are slanted New England pastorals, Frost gone surreal or crossed with Kafka and fashioned into parables."
Noah is the owner and operator of Knock Knock: Natural Coffins and Custom Woodworking, sometimes a barista, sometimes an adjunct, sometimes a bartender, sometimes a cook, and a member of the band, Lightsleeper. Currently, he lives in Vermont.
Abbey Meaker is a lens-based artist, writer, and curator based in Vermont. Using analog materials to create photographs and films, her work treats the landscape as protagonist, creating portraits of place, a means of connecting with and bringing into focus natural environments and their intangible qualities.
In November 2019, Meaker founded Artist Field, a curatorial platform for research-based projects that engage with the environment. She has most recently co-founded Another Earth with Estefania Puerta, a multilingual publishing project interested in unique perspectives and ideas about natural environments, science fiction, psychoanalysis, and analog processes.
In 2015 Meaker co-founded Overnight Projects with Sarah O’ Donnell and served as Director of Exhibitions for its duration (2015-2019). Overnight Projects was an exhibition concept that organized experiential installations in revolving locations. Notable past sites included an 1800s orphanage, a defunct coal-plant, a 1950s lakeside motel, an air stream which served as an itinerant library, and a cornfield on the cusp of reverting back to a wetland. Within five years Overnight Projects organized 13 exhibitions of regionally and internationally-based artists.
She is Studio Director for the artist Richard Erdman in Williston, Vermont and Carrara, Italy.
