Thanks everyone who came out to Galería de la Raza last night; that was some pure Side A/Side B magic, right!? Proud of Chris Cole and Josey Lee for putting together such an emotionally resonant yet experimentally bold show, and really, truly proud that we are able to present a place for such beautiful people to express themselves: whether we particularly are happy to meet Zack Haber or Mariama Lockington, or to see Karen Penley work her stage magic, or to recognize the quaver in Zoe Brezsny‘s voice as the lump in our own throats; whether we saw ourselves more clearly in Aaron DiFranco‘s Mission Renga or Valerie Chavez‘s Tenderloin Portraits or in the inexplicably new-to-poetry wonder of Matthew Rogers; whether we believed Max Tomlinson‘s story was fiction or nonfiction, felt like an outcast in our own homes, submitted from Uruguay or traveled from Colorado to make something sonorous out of a physics-based exercise meant for the page; do you imagine Chris Carosi walking through the city working on these $ poems; did you see yourself in Cybele Zufolo‘s all-encompassing elegance, in Samantha Rubenstein‘s childhood coming to terms; after all that, still, did Casey McAlduff leave you wanting more?
With our powers combined; with our bag of tricks, so endless, we, Community Wizard, hereby ask you to join us this Saturday for our first-ever East Bay show in the first leg of the first Beast Crawl at 5pm at Vessel Gallery– a free show! We are introducing a new series called Random Play, which you can read more about here, and our readers will be Lauren Becker, Chris Peck, Nicole Henares, Anna Pulley, Lizzy Acker, Amanda Snyder, Nick Johnson and Alia Volz.
Click here to help us spread the word. Then there’s two more legs and an afterparty! Hope to see you sometime… the good people organizing this festival have done a wonderful job putting it together, and we hope you’ll check it out whether you can catch our show or not.
One final thing: please send in some of your work for consideration for our three-show series at the Conservatory of Flowers! If you weren’t there last year, check out some of Julie Michelle’s photos to see what you don’t have to miss again. Deadline for August 6 and October 8 is the end of Wednesday, July 18th; tell your friends, and make sure to specify if you’d like us to consider your work for August AND October, or for only one of them. Click here to submit!
Thanks again for everything. Big, big love; c’mon, let’s hug one more time.
xoxo Evan for QL