Thursday June 29 * 7 pm * RSVP
Forget Why Poetry Series presents…
Pat Cray @yungpainkiller
Joe Hall is a Buffalo-based writer and reading series curator. His five books of poetry include Fugue & Strike (2023) and Someone’s Utopia (2018). He has performed and delivered talks nationally at universities, living rooms, squats, and rivers. His writing has appeared in places like Postcolonial Studies, Poetry Daily, Best Buds! Collective, terrain.org, Peach Mag, PEN America Blog, dollar bills, and an NFTA bus shelter. He has taught poetry workshops for teachers, teens, and workers through Just Buffalo and the WNYCOSH Worker Center. Get in touch with Joe at joehalljoehall.com.
Danika Stegeman LeMay’s work has appeared in APARTMENT, Blue Arrangements, CLOAK, Ethel Zine, Leavings, and Word for/ Word, among other places. Danika’s debut collection of poems, Pilot (2020), was published by Spork Press. Her second book, Ablation is forthcoming from 11:11 Press in November 2023. Her website is danikastegemanlemay.com.
substantive.material is a work of epiancestral process[ing] with quincéy.xavier and Sarah Bitamazire.
a collection of archives before incineration, substantive.material, supports inquiry while giving a direction that is not a refusal or acceptance of our society absent that demand to push, press, and drive forward. this is not the kind of kinetic force it is after and for that matter we are chasing nothing. our everything is suspended in an eternity named nothing. instead we are allowing works of our genetic futures to emerge and be set in motions of falling or flying or something else entirely.
this collective process remains with regard for a departure from being and becoming and knowing and into our thinking, including our bodies choreographing our flesh as significant to us and each other.
we are new here and plan to get it wrong...
we are moving in ways that defy measurement because we are important, because you are important, before being and/or knowing anything. in the ways you move, nurture, and cultivate you without being or knowing into a being and knowing that allows you to emerge. a you with something uncollapsed from desire and power… ‘you as sufficient.’
sufficient / without mythology / without martyrdom / without grandeur
Sarah Bitamazire is a professional borrower of mother tongues. She writes because she must, but enjoys it most when prompted and challenged by Q. She would never admit to being nostalgic but insists on dragging her grandmother's carpets across continents. Cares about petals, friendship and a good manicure. Her favourite adjectives are "soft" and "wild", words she misuses and misunderstands actively.
and as for quincéy.xavier, this work is entirely q's fault.