Erika Staiti & Paul Maziar 8/15 7 pm

Special one-off Switch reading! Erika Staiti is in town from Oakland, and we are happy to host her for a reading Thursday 8/15 at 7 pm at Warehouse 640 on 640 SE Stark Street. She'll be joined by the Switch's own Paul Maziar, reading from his new manuscript Pneumatics.

Erika Staiti is author of the chapbooks In the Stitches published by Trafficker Press in 2010 and Verse/Switch and Stop-Motion in 2008. Recent work appears in OMG, SAGINAW, Mrs. Maybe, and forthcoming in Dusie.

See her work at
http://erikastaiti.tumblr.com/
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2013/08/social-reading-number-one-rachel-levitsky-ariel-goldberg-on-erika-staitis-the-undying-present/

evan kennedy

Paul Maziar will read from his new manuscript, Pneumatics. He once self-published a book of poems, Last Light of Day printed by Publication Studio in 2010, and his book of spontaneous prose, What it is: What it is was published by Writebloody in '08. Both are out of print. Some poems can be found in Pataphysics and Peaches & Bats.

His drawings can be found here, among many images and things he has stumbled upon:
http://andsotobegin.tumblr.com/


By Erika Staiti (published in La Fovea, http://www.lafovea.org/La_Fovea/erika_staiti.html)

Excerpt I: The Planned Experiment

The room downstairs is covered with sheets of plastic. There are statues in the corners made of glass. Every object in the room is bright and reflecting off of itself. The far wall is covered with disintegrating parchment - an old map of the world panning across it. The names of places that no longer exist are echoing across the room, bouncing off walls, getting trapped in corners, escaping out of slightly opened windows. A birdcage hangs at eye level. Stacks of newspapers sit on a dark wooden table that is not used for eating. Altitudes transition throughout the day. Subjects alter their perceptions. Overhead lights in the movie theater dim slowly.

II.

We are in a place ruled by mobs of conflicting desires. We slither through the people and smash into them. We wander among them as if they are statues. They are miming the selves they want to be rather than being the selves that they are. We tune the receptors in the creases between our heads and our necks. We mimic ourselves when angry and we mimic ourselves when sweet. We sleep with our arms around the weather as smog collects before rolling into the beginning of the next day. We call upon ourselves to keep pace. There are too many days to take into account but we keep accounting counting turning. They want to swallow us to fill their selves. We stand by. We watch them swallow each other. Filling the innards.