Frank Sherlock, Jenn McCreary, Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Emily Abendroth: May 9, 2014

Frank Sherlock reads an assortment of poems from a new manuscript, including a poem dedicated to his mother, who'd recently passed, and a poem that imagines an alternative history where the inventor of the AK-47 became a poet instead. 

Jenn McCreary reads three new longer works. The first is a poem in eight parts titled "Sosophy." She follows this with a poem written in collaboration with Pattie McCarthy titled "Worrywart." Finally, she reads the beginning of a new work in progress, "A Cold War Devotional", inspired by what she calls "her nostalgia for being afraid of Russia," nuclear testing, and the female orgasm. The work uses epigraphs from Adrienne Rich and Freud. 

Sueyeun Juliette Lee introduces then reads a poem "on sunlight" titled "On Light," which is prefaced by two epigraphs: from scientist Rudolf Kippenhahn and from Milton's Paradise Lost.

She reads other work before telling of working out a "speculative poetics" that is "trying to imagine a human psychology of the future." She reads "What One Wants and What Will Be Prescribed Without One Single Center Forever," beginning with an epigraph from Coleridge's "Kubla Khan."

Lee then reads "more speculative poems," citing Stanisław Lem's Solaris as inspiration, exploring "the limits of knowledge as a technology."

Emily Abendroth introduces then reads from her work ] Exclosures [ (Ahsahta Press, 2014), after noting the presence of "half a dozen people I've known since I was 18 and kind of became a person with" and that the work she reads from "is really trying to think through personhood in a variety of ways." The work incorporates and moves from passages from James Baldwin and Margaret Mead's 1970 conversation published as A Rap on Race. 

Some of the aforementioned friends speak passages of Abendroth's work from the audience, off mic.