We hope you’ll join us tonight at 7pm at Brookline Booksmith to celebrate the release of Michael Lynch’s Underlife and Portico. Michael will be reading alongside Nicole Terez Dutton and Erica Anzalone. You definitely don’t want to miss this!
What are you doing May 31?
A poetry reading? That’s cool. Which one?
Oh, you’re going to Brookline Booksmith to celebrate the release of Underlife and Portico (2nd ed)?
That’s great! We love Brookline Booksmith!
See you there!
Aforementioned Productions proudly presents a staged reading of “The Daughters,” an original play about women, family, and war, premiering at the Dorchester Fringe Festival!
Portions of the play have been published in CONSEQUENCE, Newfound, and The Massachusetts Review.
The reading will be at 5pm on Saturday, May 18, at the Erick Jean Center for the Arts. The cast will include Lillian Mara Medville, Carissa Halston, Jennifer O’Connor, Timothy Hoover, and Randolph Pfaff.
Brass tacks details:
Erick Jean Center for the Arts
157A Washington Street
Dorchester, MA
Accessible via public transit on the 16 and 23 bus lines.
Aforementioned Productions calls Boston our home and we’re very proud to be one of the sponsors of a reading next Thursday to help raise money for The One Fund. We hope that you’ll join us, along with an all-star group of readers including Robert Pinsky, Sue Miller, and Jill McDonough, to support this important cause.
Right before AWP, we received news that we’d been very eager to hear. And now we can share it with you!
Aforementioned Productions is now a non-profit corporation!
This is the first step in what we hope will be a big, official year for AP (which will involve getting distribution and releasing a full-length prose collection!). You can help us start it off right by making a tax-deductible donation here.
Boston survived AWP! Even with the snow and the wind and the low visibility!
We, too, survived. See the visual evidence below, including photos from the release party for apt‘s third print annual and our misadventures from the bookfair!
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- Event flyers!
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- Carissa Halston, co-founding editor, overeager for the bookfair before it even starts
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- BOOKFAIR!
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- Shannon Walsh, web editor at Anomalous Press, prefers to remain Anomalous
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- Randolph Pfaff, co-founding editor, at table M4
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- Carissa Halston with Anomalous Press co-founder, Erica Mena-Landry
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- Josh Cook, local writer and apt/LF contributor, showing off his skills
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- Carissa Halston, Literary Firsts mastermind, looking as crazy as ever
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- Randolph color coordinates his clothes to his literature.
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- Anomalous editor, David/Raver, also color coordinates with apt!
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- Evan Perriello, local fiction writer, with his story, “The Arrows Are On Their Way”
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- Always by our side, our faithful mascot, Leopold, the Just
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- Buttons of the tandem Carissa-Randolph, the Literary Firsts Flyer girl, and the apt Rocket Man! (buttons courtesy of Anomalous Press)
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- Ladies and gentlemen, apt contributor, Lam Pham!
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- Randolph Pfaff co-hosts the apt release party (Carissa Halston not pictured)
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- Sarah Fawn Montgomery reads at the apt release party
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- Lam Pham reads at the apt release party
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- Steven LaFond reads at the apt release party
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- Denise Warren reads at the apt release party
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- We packed them in at Lir for the apt release party
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- Dolan Morgan reads at the apt release party
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- Alexis Pope reads at the apt release party
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- Michelle Cheever reads at the apt release party
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- Arthur, you look a bit unwell. Some may say undead.
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- Justin Lawrence Daughtery and Carissa Halston at the AGNI reading
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- Ah, young love. (Steven LaFond manhandles editor, Randolph Pfaff)
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- Poet and founder of U35 and Critical Flame, Daniel Evans Pritchard with his poem, “At Dawn: Eurydice”
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- Poet and author of They Used to Dance on Saturday Nights, Gillian Devereux, at table M4!
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- Michael Lynch, author of Underlife and Portico, signs at table M4!
Just in case you’re clamoring for photos and videos from Saturday night’s Literary Firsts reading, all of that is now available at the main LF site.
And, in all the frantic goings-on of the conference and the bookfair, we neglected to mention exciting news. But it’s so important, we feel it really needs its own post. News forthcoming!
Jordan Sanderson has written an insightful review of the second edition of Underlife and Portico at Heavy Feather Review. An excerpt:
Sensual and visceral, Lynch’s poems are “heavy near bursting.” They recognize but see through the ennui of suburban life, and they unveil a natural world in which we see “[t]he rhyming color of lip and areole,” “night’s starred cartwheel,” and “alleys of sunlight.”
We’re ecstatic about this book (and these words). We think you will be too:
“Michael Lynch’s poems are pure vision: language becoming image becoming language again. This is a book of poetry you’ll return to as many times as God has names.” — Rusty Barnes
“These fresh, lively poems, with their playfully sexy turns of phrase (“beestung or g-strung”)—surprisingly poignant (and poignantly surprising)—are a pleasure to read. Just look at “Substantial Fascinators,” a wonderfully original love poem, where for a moment we can forgive even monsters when we remember that there was once a time when they too, like other people we loved, wore flowers in their hair.” — Lloyd Schwartz
Order your copy today!
We’re uber-busy, gearing up for apt’s third print annual, but we’ve never been big fans of free time, so we’re also working on the second edition of Michael Lynch’s chapbook, Underlife and Portico, which will be ready just in time for AWP!
We think Christopher Frost (of Neon) distilled what we love most about the book, and not just because he uses the word apt: “The images are familiar, even friendly: a bowl of oranges on the counter, a cafe, hedgerows and Reader’s Digest. But there’s also another side to this set of twenty poems, in which these ordinary objects and scenes are underlined with a quiet and oppressive darkness. In this way the title of the collection is particularly apt. There’s the beauty of the portico, and the little-seen underlife with all its seething, quiet shadow. The two elements meld perfectly throughout, each balancing the other.”
You can pre-order a copy of Underlife and Portico here and, if you’re coming to Boston for AWP, stop by table M4 at 2pm on Saturday, March 9, when Michael will be there signing copies of the new edition!