This Saturday, June 30, you are invited to a ceremonious book launch at Resurgence Brewing Company (1250 Niagara Street). Authors Ben Brindise and Justin Karcher will entertain guests as they read passages from Those Who Favor Fire, Those Who Pray to Fire – a newly released, dual full length collection of poetry.
The reading will take place around the Resurgence fire pit in the beer garden. The event is free to attend, and signed copies of the book will be available for purchase ($10). The reading will start at 7pm.
The book you’ll soon be holding is a charred reminder of who you used to be, when you’d connect the stars in the night sky with your toxic fingers, hazily charting your life path with shitty decisions and hashtag hallelujahs, tracing your chalk outline on a full cold moon, when you’d take some dead man’s grill lighter and burn holes in the only people who love you.
It’s a bombed out church where the only people praying look like mounds of oil-slicked snow, where they smell like rotten tacos on a boozy Saturday night, a sacred place where prayer sounds like a first-generation iPod screaming back to life and all we’re trying to do is push through the constant smoke, a chain gang of dirty souls in Purgatory still striving to do better.
About the Authors:
Just Buffalo Literary Center teaching artist BEN BRINDISE is a spoken word poet and fiction writer. He represented Buffalo, New York in the 2015 and 2016 National Poetry Slam, helping Buffalo to place in the top 15 for the first time. He will represent the city again at the 2018 National Poetry Slam in Chicago, IL this August. He is the author of a hybrid chapbook of fiction and poetry, Rotten Kid (Ghost City Press, 2017), and the novella, I Was a Lid (Amazon, 2013). He has been a writer-in-residence at North Park Academy and the Gloria J. Parks Community Center teaching performance poetry. He encourages his students to be brave in their approach to writing, and tries to do the same himself. He tweets @benbrindise
JUSTIN KARCHER is a poet and playwright born and raised in Buffalo, New York. He is the author of Tailgating at the Gates of Hell (Ghost City Press, 2015), the chapbook When Severed Ears Sing You Songs (CWP Collective Press, 2017), the micro-chapbook Just Because You’ve Been Hospitalized for Depression Doesn’t Mean You’re Kanye West (Ghost City Press, 2017), and—with Ben Brindise—Those Who Favor Fire, Those Who Pray to Fire (EMP, 2018). He is also the editor of Ghost City Review and co-editor of the anthology My Next Heart: New Buffalo Poetry (BlazeVOX [books], 2017). He tweets @Justin_Karcher