February 19, 2017

Jen Coleman, Alison Dennis & Chris Piuma

Sunday, February 19
7:00 p.m.

Passages Bookshop
1223 NE Martin Luther King Jr Blvd

*music by Alison Dennis, poetry readings by Jen Coleman and Chris Piuma*

Jen Coleman is author of PSALMS FOR DOGS AND SORCERERS, from Trembling Pillow Press and WE DENIZENS (2016) from Furniture Press.

Alison Dennis, a.k.a. Dr. Something, is a songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who has been recording and performing music in Portland for over a decade. She creates catchy chamber pop featuring piano, synth, guitar, clarinet, saxophone, and bass. Her music is an attempt  to seamlessly blend earnestness and facetiousness, art and novelty. She also currently plays keyboards and saxophone in the psych-pop band All I Feel Is Yes and has previously performed with the bands Coney Island Cartel, Y La Bamba,  Audie Darling,  and Leonard Mynx. More info at drsomething.com. 

Chris Piuma was one of the founders of Spare Room. He now lives in Toronto with a husband and a cat, where he designs books and takes photographs and makes videos. Some of his most recently published poems were in Cotton Nero A.x (eth press, 2014), a collaborate dystranslation of the works of the "Pearl" poet, the wisdom of the universes in a single stream of letters (xexoxial, 2015), a record of the 2013 International Pwoermd Writing Month, and illiterature issue 5: the graphic novel (puddles of sky, 2015). 

Rock dog


There's a selfish drift in the mist.

Its Lemmy from the abyss. 

The bass-tone front man spawns in our midst

and plays hard HARD again and he's Motörhead 

wrapped in the invisible hair of a thousand thousand women

that are all Lilith, all one Lilith, who has caught

Lemmy in a single pair of yellow eyes 

and held him unblinking, drawn into her snake arms,

rocking him heavier than a mother can bear. 

Lilith who will tear any leather-clad rocker 

out of the life he clings to by the skin of his teeth

and bed him in the ether, bed him on the rock

that makes Gene Simmons and Henry Rollins

and Alice Cooper rockers with hearts and lungs,

rockers who Lilith will whisper to in sacred syllables 

how a rock god is but a dog a rock dog a dogged animal 

 rocking the ether with a proper pleasure. 

Who would rock the ether with selfish hedonist's would-be sacred syllables 

but Lemmy the rock dog a dogged animal 

who Lilith will bed out of the leather-

clad life wrapped in her invisible hair,

all the dogged rockers in her hair and only just one 

bass-tone front man spawned in the mist. 

Lemmy from the abyss.  


Jen Coleman




[below: "Ars Poetica" by Chris Piuma]

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