About this Event
Walton Well Press celebrates the release of two new poetry collections: Karen Kevorkian's Here In My Body It Feels Crowded, and Born In A Barn On Venus, a collaborative book between poet Gail Wronksy and artist Gronk. The authors will read from their new collections in The Wanda Coleman Theater accompanied by Logan Metz--former band member of Lukas Nelson's group, Promise of the Real--and L.A. based musician Lincoln Mendell.
Praise for Here In My Body It Feels Crowded
“Packed with fleeting visual details, the poems in Karen Kevorkian’s deeply original Here in My Body it Feels Crowded feel at once intimate and observed from an eerie distance. Kevorkian skillfully places each image and gesture with both utter precision and the clearest eyes —in this way the poems enact small disarming worlds, entirely idiosyncratic, language stretching and collapsing on itself, self-inflicted compound words—pleasurably ungoverned sentences we let drift over us like clouds and accept as being made of the stuff of our very own world, if slant. Kevorkian reminds us, powerfully so, that the meaning of our lives—their poignancy and lushness, their arc of time, is built from noticing, and noticing is an art. I can’t remember the last time I read work so familiar yet strange.”
—Louise Mathias
Praise for Born In A Barn On Venus
“The paintings and the poems exist outside time, or despite time; they resist the very genre they inhabit, refuse to be masterpieces, and therefore rise into icons.”
—Diane Seuss, Heavy Feather Review
About the artists
Karen Kevorkian is a native of San Antonio who moved to San Francisco but detoured to the east coast before returning to California and working as an editor for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, teaching poetry and fiction writing workshops at UCLA, and before that at the University of Virginia. Here in My Body It Feels Crowded is her fourth poetry collection. Her poems are recently published in New American Writing, Volt, Four Way Review, Taos Journal of Poetry, and many other journals. She has been awarded fellowships from the Djerassi Resident Artist Program, the Ucross Foundation, the Millay Colony for the Arts, MacDowell, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. In Los Angeles she was a board member for seven years of Beyond Baroque literary arts center and is a founding member of the Glass Table Collective, publisher of What Books Press.
Gail Wronsky is the author, coauthor, or translator of fifteen books of poetry and prose. The recipient of an Artist Fellowship from the California Arts Council, she is a founding member of the Glass Table Artists Collective and lives in Topanga, California.
Gronk is a Los Angeles painter, printmaker, muralist, and theater and performance artist. A founding member of ASCO, Gronk collaborates with the LA and Santa Fe Operas and the Kronos Quartet. His work is found in the Corcoran, Smithsonian, LACMA, and Riverside Art Museum’s Cheech Marin collection.
Ticket purchase is required. No one will be turned away for lack of funds! Tickets will be available at the Beyond Baroque bookstore on the day of the event, but we recommend registering in advance through Eventbrite. Masks are encouraged while inside our center.
Livestream: If you can’t join us in-person the event will be livestreamed on at the scheduled time of the event.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
681 N Venice Blvd, 681 North Venice Boulevard, Los Angeles, United States
USD 0.00 to USD 11.49
