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Gabrielle Bates in Conversation With Luther Hughes

Powell's City of Books 1005 W Burnside Street, Portland, OR, United States

Gabrielle Bates’s electric debut collection, Judas Goat (Tin House), plumbs the depths of intimate relationships. The book’s eponymous animal is used to lead sheep to slaughter, while its own life is spared, and its harrowing existence echoes through this spellbinding collection of forty poems, which wrestle with betrayal and forced obedience, violence and young womanhood, and the “forbidden felt language” of sexual and sacred love. Bates’s poems conjure encounters with figures from scriptures, domesticated animals eyeing the wild, and mothering as a shape-shifting, spectral force; they question what it means to love another person and how to exorcise childhood fears. All the while, the Deep South haunts, and no matter how far away the speaker moves, the South always draws her back home. In confession,…

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Free

Kids’ Storytime

Powell's City of Books 1005 W Burnside Street, Portland, OR, United States

Join us every Saturday for kids’ storytime. Today we’re reading Telling Stories Wrong by Gianni Rodari. Buy the Book

Free

POETRY READING BY DYLAN ANGELL & DAN RAPHAEL

Passages Bookshop 1801 NW Upshur, Suite 660, Portland, OR, United States

Spare Room Reading Series & Passages Bookshop present a poetry reading and book launch for Dylan Angell (Demanding the Room) and Dan Raphael (In the Wordshed). Door opens at 6:00 pm; reading at 6:30 pm (no late entry). Admission free — Mask & vax required Dylan Angell is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. He has released a number of chapbooks including Anywhere I Lay My Head, released by The Silent Academy, and Photo Never Taken, released by The Concern Newsstand. He co-organizes Evenings, a mixed media series, with Loan Tran and Victoria Bouloubasis. His new collection Demanding the Room, with artwork by Mark He, is published by Bored Wolves. He plays the trumpet and likes to swim in natural bodies of water.…

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Free

Stephen Markley in Conversation With Omar El Akkad

Powell's City of Books 1005 W Burnside Street, Portland, OR, United States

From Stephen Markley, author of Ohio, comes a masterful American epic charting a near future approaching collapse and a nascent but strengthening solidarity. In the first decades of the 21st century, the world is convulsing, its governments mired in gridlock while a patient but unrelenting ecological crisis looms. America is in upheaval, battered by violent weather and extreme politics. In California in 2013, Tony Pietrus, a scientist studying deposits of undersea methane, receives a death threat. His fate will become bound to a stunning cast of characters — a broken drug addict, a star advertising strategist, a neurodivergent mathematician, a cunning eco-terrorist, an actor turned religious zealot, and a brazen young activist named Kate Morris, who, in the mountains of Wyoming, begins a project that…

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Free

Morgan Thomas in Conversation With Genevieve Hudson

Powell's City of Books 1005 W Burnside Street, Portland, OR, United States

The nine stories in Morgan Thomas’s shimmering debut collection witness Southern queer and genderqueer characters determined to find themselves reflected in the annals of history, whatever the cost. As Thomas’s subjects trace deceit and violence through Southern tall tales and their own pasts, their journeys reveal the porous boundaries of body, land, and history, and the sometimes ruthless awakenings of self-discovery. A trans woman finds her independence with the purchase of a pregnancy bump; a young Virginian flees their relationship, choosing instead to immerse themself in the life of an intersex person from Colonial-era Jamestown. A writer tries to evade the murky and violent legacy of an ancestor who supposedly disappeared into a midwifery bag, and in the uncanny title story, a young trans person…

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Free

Slamlandia

Literary Arts 925 SW Washington Street, Portland, OR, United States

Slamlandia is a poetry open mic and slam that meets every month. This mic provides a creative, fun, and welcoming space for all literary communities in Portland. We encourage poets new and old to come share their work. We strive towards a safer space for poets to read their own poetry, witness others, and participate in community. This event takes place in-person. Proof of Covid-19 vaccine or a negative PCR test is required for admittance. Please see our Covid-19 guidelines for in-person events at Literary Arts. Hosted by Julia Gaskill. Julia Gaskill Julia Gaskill is a professional daydreamer hailing from Portland, Oregon. Her poetry examines the tightrope we sometimes walk of feeling our voices censored and also being unabashedly ourselves. Her poems touch on everyday…

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Free

Filament Reading Series

The Corporeal Writing Center 510 SW 3rd Ave #101, Portland, OR, United States

Filament is BACK! Filament is an all-genre Creative Writing Reading series from Portland State’s MFA Program. Join us on February 17 from 7 - 8:30 PM at Corporeal Writing to hear five talented writers from the Creative Writing program read their work! Free to attend. Masks and Vaccine Cards Required. Featuring: Joshua Stanek, Natalie Flaherty, Nora Broker, Jay Butler, and Alex Roselio De La Cruz

Free

Fonograf Listening Party: John Ashbery Live at Sanders Theatre & More Poets [POSTPONED]

Dorsa Brevia 625 NW Everett Street #103, Portland, OR, United States

Join us Friday, Feb. 24th for a listening party in celebration of Fonograf's first archival LP, John Ashbery Live at Sanders Theatre, 1976. Readings by Sarah Bartlett, Natalie Garyet, Emmi Greer, and Karolinn Fiscaletti, each will be reading a favorite Ashbery poem, along with a few of their own poems. Drinks, records, books, etc. 7 PM

Free

SPARE ROOM PRESENTS CHRIS DANIELS & DAVID ABEL [POSTPONED]

Passages Bookshop 1801 NW Upshur, Suite 660, Portland, OR, United States

Doors open at 7:00 pm; reading at 7:30 pm Admission free; no late entry Masks recommended Passages Bookshop 1801 NW Upshur, Suite 660 Portland, OR 97209 503-388-7665 = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = Chris Daniels is a self-taught (feral) translator of global Lusophone poetry. He has published book-length translations of Josely Vianna Baptista (On the Shining Screen of the Eyelids), Fernando Pessoa (Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro and Collected Later Poems of Alvaro de Campos), and Adelaide Ivanova (The Hammer). One Impossible Step, the selected poems of Orides Fontela, is forthcoming from…

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Free

Fonograf Listening Party: John Ashbery Live at Sanders Theatre & More Poets

Dorsa Brevia 625 NW Everett Street #103, Portland, OR, United States

Take two: 7 PM on March 3rd at Dorsa Brevia in downtown PDX. Readings by Sarah Bartlett, Natalie Garyet, Emmi Greer, and Karolinn Fiscaletti. Hope to see you for real this time! Join us Friday, March 3rd for a listening party in celebration of Fonograf‘s first archival LP, John Ashbery Live at Sanders Theatre, 1976. Readings by Sarah Bartlett, Natalie Garyet, Emmi Greer, and Karolinn Fiscaletti, each will be reading a favorite Ashbery poem, along with a few of their own poems. Drinks, records, books, etc. 7 PM

Free
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