7-9pm, readings start promptly at 7:30pm
$8 entry (no one turned away for lack of funds), free for members
Reserve seats: member login or guest registration

David Abel is the proprietor of Passages Bookshop & Gallery in Portland, Oregon, and the author of Float (Chax Press), Tether (Barebone Books), and Carrier (c_L Books), among other titles. Three books are forthcoming in 2017: Selected Durations (Black Rock Press), XIV Eclipses (Couch Press), and sequitur her (press-press-pull). With Sam Lohmann, he publishes the Airfoil chapbook series.

In his time in Portland, he has devised more than thirty performance, film, theater, and intermedia projects, both solo and with a wide range of collaborators. A founding member of the Spare Room reading series, now in its sixteenth year, he was also an inaugural Research Fellow of the Center for Art + Environment of the Nevada Museum of Art.

Brent Cunningham is a writer, publisher and visual artist living in Oakland.  He has published two books of poetry, Bird & Forest (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2005) and Journey to the Sun (Atelos, 2012), and has a chapbook of fake Arthur Rimbaud translations, The Sad Songs of Hell, forthcoming this summer from Ugly Duckling.  He works as the Operations Director at Small Press Distribution in Berkeley.  In 2005 he and Neil Alger founded Hooke Press, a chapbook press dedicated to publishing short runs of poetry, criticism, theory, writing and ephemera. He has been working on a novel for a disconcertingly long time.

Trisha Low is the author of The Compleat Purge (Kenning Edition, 2013). She lives in Oakland and is currently working on a book entitled SOCIALIST REALISM.



David Abel

the path of time’s arrow is


            bent by the eddies of memories of losses


swallows skim the air above the artful pond

 
            whose tender willows’ leaves shimmer in the mirror
 

where the lines of my face     recede     from the fingers of your hand


Brent Cunningham

from The Sad Songs of Hell

Sensation

mostly I use these bruised digits to make you feel
they dress dolls in peacoats, befoul menus with herb-stains
but they never forget: they’re not raspberry-capped feet—
only your bare chest opens their imperceptible vents

if you want an excuse for me here it is: I think the body’s a rind
love only feels infinite & only if you’re on the mounting end
it’s obvious you and I have legs, good legs, like all Bohemians
but when Nature created those she wasn’t even a Woman


False starts is curated by Steven Seidenberg, contact falsestartsreadingseries@gmail.com