Thursday Nov 16, 2023
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
POWERHOUSE Arena
28 Adams Street (Corner of Adams & Water Street across from the Archway)
Brooklyn , NY
11201
Drinks Provided by Ghia.
About the Book.
In the disquieting stories of Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts, a fractaled Claire Donato contemplates grief and disgust in heterosexuality, deconstructing the romance myth and the illicit fantasies which reflect our haunted selves. These fictions are populated with Lynchian characters, draped in memory and the subconscious mind, who imagine their way out of the painful limits of their world: a turtle retreats into its shell and becomes a real girl. A porn addict turns into a baby boy in the arms of his barren cyber-girlfriend. And a digitally-marred depressive joins forces with the ghost of Simone Weil to kill a chicken.
Donato’s fictions are precise and cutting, seamlessly integrating a vast knowledge of art through sharp criticism and a history of cult traditions: Donnie Darko, Wings of Desire, Daisies, and Twin Peaks and artists including Clarice Lispector, M.F.K. Fisher, Sibylle Baier, and The Velvet Underground.
Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts concludes with “Gravity and Grace, the Chicken and the Egg, or: How to Cook Everything Vegetarian”, a novella-in-vignettes that frames cooking as an entrypoint to light, awareness, and connection. With associative lyricism and a preternatural ability to gaze into the void with tenderness, Donato relays an indescribably strange perception of our world, in which maniacal grief turns to a gleeful protest before becoming, against all odds, a love letter to what remains.
About the Author.
Claire Donato is the author of Burial, a fiction novella, and The Second Body, a full-length collection of poems. Her work has been included in numerous anthologies, and recent writing has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Fence, The Chicago Review, Forever, BOMB, The Elephants, DIAGRAM, and GoldFlakePaint. She also contributed an introduction to The One on Earth: Selected Works of Mark Baumer. In addition to writing books, Claire makes music, illustrates, and has a 35mm photography practice. Currently, she works as Acting Chairperson of Writing at Pratt Institute, where she received the 2020-2021 Distinguished Teacher Award. She lives in Brooklyn with her cat Woebegone.
About the Moderator.
Molly Soda is an artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Nearly all of her work lives online, as she uses a variety of social media platforms to host it, evolving and interacting with the platforms themselves over time. Soda is a .gif, a picture on a Pinterest board, a link, a file on a desktop. She is saved, downloaded, and discarded.
About the Readers.
Abigail Greene is a writer from Rhode Island. Her practice consists of writing prose, making short videos, and playing the flute. She currently lives in Brooklyn, NY, where she is working on her debut novel.
Jaylen Strong is a poet-worker, librarian curator, elegiac archivist, friend (to those who are their friends), and knows their enemies well. They are concerned with the necessity of the poet as a tool for revolutionary thought-struggle and steward for the people. They are currently living inside their manuscript Weep Not, a counternarrative grief-cartography document interrogating the arena of the death-tragedy of a beloved. Their work has been featured for and at MoMA PS1, Artists Space, Blank Forms, The Brooklyn Rail, Pratt Institute, Brown University, moCa Cleveland, The Center for African American Poetry & Poetics, and elsewhere.
About the Musician.
Zach Phillips (Fievel is Glauque, Blanche Blanche Blanche) is a songwriter, poet, and civil rights legal worker living in New York City. He co-leads the bands Fievel Is Glauque, Blanche Blanche Blanche, Perfect Angels and Martyr Group and used to run the label OSR Tapes.
Incidental clavinet by Zach Phillips (Fievel Is Glauque, Blanche Blanche Blanche)