An event coming up at The Gypsy Parlor is being touted as an ode to Buffalo’s stalwart literary community. On Friday, March 2, the second installment of the launch of My Next Heart (a book that celebrates local poets and writers) will commence. The initial launch event was held at Mohawk Place back in December. Next up, a number of the book’s featured 54 poets (aged 16-40) will read “slam and spoken word” poetry, including Venezia Appleby, Matthew Bosque, LaVerne Thompson, Janna Willoughby-Lohr, Benjamin Brindise, Skyler Rutkowski, Lissa Roads, Megan Kemple, and Brandon Williamson.
The poets in this collection have a few simple commonalities that bind them: young poets who inherited a language shaped by a city, they’ve gone on to shape a city’s language. It is a book that hopes to explore that city and that language. – Noah Falck and Justin Karcher
The collection includes nationally recognized poets like Lillian Yvonne-Bertram and Kristina Marie Darling and local innovators and influencers like Ben Brindise, Rachelle Toarmino, and Robin Jordan, alongside up-and-coming writers from the city’s colleges and even high schools.
“My Next Heart is a journey through a city the way it should be: many hands, many images, many cars with many windows down. There’s the tender humor of Alana Kelley’s ‘The Only Muscle I Work Out Is My Tongue’ (‘we’ll sit facing one another / on the floor / and take turns french kissing’) and there is the water’s hollow echoing through the pages when Brian McMahon writes ‘life is the sound / of a pebble plunging / into the Buffalo River’ and there is the confessional sadness of Tom Dreitlein. All of the work inside of this anthology sings to a different corner of the place where it was born. Even the work that isn’t about Buffalo sings to a very particular emotional interior that builds its own, new home. You will love this anthology if you love a place you were born, or born again. You will love this anthology if you close your eyes from somewhere you are and dream of somewhere you want to be. There are many ways to see yourself in this bounty of lovely, furious, heartfelt, high stakes writing. I hope you will find at least one.” – Hanif Abdurraqib, author of They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us
My Next Heart: New Buffalo Poetry Launch Continues
Friday, March 2, 2018
7pm
Gypsy Parlor | 376 Grant Street | Buffalo, NY 14213
Live music by Surviving Friday
The event is free and open to the public.
Representatives from Talking Leaves Books will be present with copies for sale. Released by Buffalo-based publisher BlazeVOX [books] in December 2017