- Poetry Press Week
For its spring/summer iteration, the crazy poetry lovers at Poetry Press Week put out an open call for local writers to submit work for a Fashion Week-inspired staging at the festival June 19-20. Judges Zachary Schomburg and Samiya Bashir selected writer/musician Timmy Straw and Zachary Cosby, one half of Bone Tax Press. Straw’s well known as a songwriter, which seems like a great fit for PPW’s performative approach to poetry. Cosby’s an emerging writer—at times, this shows. In his latest chapbook, Cave (Bottlecap Press), his writing has an exploratory feel to it that doesn’t always seem quite resolved, but at their best, his poems are strange, contained pieces full of tangible, sad images.
- Bottlecap Press
- CAVE, BY ZACHARY COSBY: May contain “gloom sunflowers” (and sadness).
Straw and Cosby will be joined by regulars Alicia Jo Rabins, Drew Scott Swenhaugen, A.M. O’Malley, Robert Lashley, Andrea Hollander, Stacey Tran, Carl Adamshick, and Tyler Brewington. Tran’s one local writer whose work often seems to benefit from an interdisciplinary approach. At Lynne Tillman’s book release for Weird Fucks at PICA in February, Tran gave a presentation combining found text with the weird, pseudo-scientific animations of skin layers you see in makeup commercials, which is a not-very-good description of what was an excellent piece of writing presented in the least boring way possible. It’ll be interesting to see what Tran comes up with in June.