[theswitchpdx]

Amy Berkowitz & Ashley Toliver

Friday, October 9

7:30 pm (sharp), doors at 7:00

Independent Publishing Resource Center

1001 SE Division

FREE

Amy Berkowitz is the author of Tender Points (Timeless, Infinite Light). Her writing has appeared in Dusie, Textsound, and Where Eagles Dare, and on the VIDA blog. In 2014, she was a Writer in Residence at Alley Cat Bookstore & Gallery. She lives in a rent-controlled apartment in San Francisco, where she is the founding editor of Mondo Bummer Books and the host of the Amy's Kitchen Organics reading series.

Ashley Toliver is the author of Ideal Machine (Poor Claudia). Her poems have appeared in Caketrain, Front Porch, PEN America and Third Coast. A Cave Canem graduate fellow, she currently lives in Portland.

[theswitchpdx]

The Switch poetry series is very happy to host Anastacia Tolbert from Seattle and Portland’s own Robert Duncan Gray this Saturday, August 8 at 7 p.m. IPRC, 1001 SE Division. http://theswitchpdx.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-switch-is-proud-to-announce-reading.html

[physicspaw]

Yukiyo Kawano giving a talk about her art (pictured here) for the Switch

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http://yukiyokawano.com/

[theswitchpdx]

The Switch is super excited to host a special event at the Radio Room featuring readings by Jamalieh Haley and Stacey Tran in conjunction with an exhibit of visual art by Yukiyo Kawano. When: Wednesday, April 22, 7 pm sharp Where: Radio Room, 1101 NE Alberta, PDX

Jamalieh Haley lives in Portland, Oregon where she co-curates If Not For Kidnap and teaches writing and literature. Her work has appeared in Interrupture, Sink Review, Everyday Genius, Sixth Finch, Plinth and she is the author of Strange Tarot (Poor Claudia, 2014). Yukiyo Kawano, a third generation hibakusha (nuclear bomb survivor) grew up decades after the bombing of Hiroshima. Her work is personal, reflecting lasting attitudes towards the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Kawano’s main focus is her/our forgetfulness, her/our dialectics of memory, issues around cultural politics, and historical politics. She has an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, is the recipient of numerous grants, and has exhibited her work in the U.S. and Japan. Stacey Tran is a curator of a performance series,  Pure Surface, and an editor of a small press publisher, Poor Claudia. Her poems have appeared in The Curator, Imperial Matters, BOAAT, The Volta, and other publications online and in print. She lives and works in Portland, OR.

[theswitchpdx]

The Switch is super excited to host a special event at the Radio Room featuring readings by Jamalieh Haley and Stacey Tran in conjunction with an exhibit of visual art by Yukiyo Kawano. When: Wednesday, April 22, 7 pm sharp Where: Radio Room, 1101 NE Alberta, PDX

Jamalieh Haley lives in Portland, Oregon where she co-curates If Not For Kidnap and teaches writing and literature. Her work has appeared in Interrupture, Sink Review, Everyday Genius, Sixth Finch, Plinth and she is the author of Strange Tarot (Poor Claudia, 2014). Yukiyo Kawano, a third generation hibakusha (nuclear bomb survivor) grew up decades after the bombing of Hiroshima. Her work is personal, reflecting lasting attitudes towards the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Kawano’s main focus is her/our forgetfulness, her/our dialectics of memory, issues around cultural politics, and historical politics. She has an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, is the recipient of numerous grants, and has exhibited her work in the U.S. and Japan. Stacey Tran is a curator of a performance series,  Pure Surface, and an editor of a small press publisher, Poor Claudia. Her poems have appeared in The Curator, Imperial Matters, BOAAT, The Volta, and other publications online and in print. She lives and works in Portland, OR.

[theswitchpdx]

BEN ESTES / SUE TOMPKINS LISTENING PARTY SUN, APRIL 19TH at Publication Studio: 717 SW Ankeny St, 6:00 p.m. Readings by Emily Kendal Frey, Patricia No, and other guests! Presented by The Song Cave & The Switch, in celebration of the release of Ben’s book Illustrated Games of Patience, a series of listening parties have taken place around the US. At PS in downtown PDX, gather with other Song Cave enthusiasts, grab an mp3 player and listen to audio recordings of two new pieces by Sue Tompkins, made especially for this tour, and a recording of Ben's poems, read by Ben. MP3 players will be provided. This event will include snacks and other surprises. * Ben Estes is the author of the chapbooks Lamp like l’map (Factory Hollow Press), Cymbals (The Song Cave), and 8 Poems (Engineered Garments), and Illustrated Games of Patience (The Song Cave). He currently lives in New York. Sue Tompkins is an artist and a musician. Using a range of media including collage, painting, performance and typewritten text, her visual practice explores the subtleties of language, relying on an approach akin to concrete poetry. Tompkins’ works have been described as "strung-out exercises in associative free thought: performance poetry that moves from the page to the voice, from speech to song, from song to signal, from signal to pure sound." Her work has been shown in the 29th Sao Paolo Biennale, at the Hayward Gallery, London, MACBA, Barcelona, ICA, London, Kunsthalle Basel, Tate Modern, London, and many others. Sue lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland. theswitchpdx.tumblr.com | the-song-cave.com | publicationstudio.biz

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Karmin & O'Malley 1/31 7:30 pm IPRC

The Switch is pleased to present Jennifer Karmin of Chicago and Portland's own A.M. O'Malley.

When: Saturday, January 31, doors at 7 pm, reading at 7:30 sharp. FREE

  Where: IPRC, 1001, SE Division, PDX

Jennifer Karmin’s multidisciplinary projects have been presented across the U.S., Cuba, Japan, Kenya, and Europe.  A founding curator of the Red Rover Series, she is author of the text-sound epic Aaaaaaaaaaalice.  Her poetry is widely published, most recently in I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women, The &NOW Awards: The Best Innovative Writing, the Iraq War chronicle 4000 Words 4000 Dead + Revolutionary Optimism: An American Elegy, and as Bernadette Mayer’s assistant on The Helens of Troy, NY.  She teaches creative writing to immigrants at Truman College and has been a Visiting Writer at Naropa University, Oberlin College, California Institute of the Arts, plus a myriad of sites.  In 2015, she returns to Cuba for a collaboration that will be part of the Havana Biennial. Here is her neutrino poem, with Bernadette Mayer.

A.M. O'Malley has been writing and publishing on various planes since 1998. Ms. O’Malley left home at 17 years old and began her own odyssey, zigzagging across the United States, working as a waitress, bartender, a community organizer, a Kirby vacuum salesman, a maid, canvasser and through it all she was writing and reading and making zines. She has recently been published in The Newer York, Jerkpoet, Poor Claudia, Phenome, UnShod Quills, The Burnside Review and The Portland Review. Her work also appears in the forthcoming anthology Untangling the Knot: Queer Voices on Marriage, Relationships & Identity edited by Carter Sickels for Ooligan Press. She is a Literary Arts Writers in the Schools teaching artist, a Young Audiences Teaching Artist Studio graduate, a Regional Arts and Culture Council grant recipient and winner of the 2014 Skidmore Prize. In 2012, Ms. O’Malley started a writing and publishing program at the Columbia River Correctional Institution and goes there every Tuesday night to teach writing to incarcerated men. She lives and works in Portland, Oregon.  Find her work HERE, HERE, and HERE.

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[theswitchpdx]

Will you be able to say you were there?

The Switch presents poets Nathan Wade Carter, Sarah Dowling & Rachel Zolf reading in Portland.  

When: Monday, September 22, doors at 6:30 p.m., reading at 7 pm sharp. FREE   Where: IPRC, 1001 SE Division St., Portland, OR

Nathan Wade Carter is a poet, musician and artist living in Portland, Oregon. His poetry can be found most recently in Potluck Magazine and on InkNode. He writes and performs music under the name Purrbot. His music can be found on Bandcamp and Spotify. Find him online at nathanwadecarter.com.

Sarah Dowling is the author of DOWN, Birds & Bees, and Security Posture, winner of the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. Selections from her work appear in I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women. Her critical work has appeared in American Quarterly, GLQ, Canadian Literature, Signs and elsewhere. Dowling is an Assistant Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell.  

Rachel Zolf’s fifth book of poetry is Janey’s Arcadia (Coach House, Fall 2014), an aversive, conversive reckoning with the ongoing errors of Canadian settler-colonialism. Other publications include Neighbour Procedure (2010) and Human Resources (2007), which won the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. Among her many collaborations with other artists, she wrote the film The Light Club of Vizcaya: A Women’s Picture, directed by New York artist Josiah McElheny, which premiered at Art Basel Miami 2012. She has taught at The New School and the University of Calgary, and has recently returned to her hometown, Toronto.

[dannielschoonebeek]

THE POEMS OF OTHERS

In which a poet hands over a basket of poems that he’s been unable to loose from his head in the past few weeks. 

                                                          • • •

Hymn to Life - Timothy Donnelly #Misanthropocene - Juliana Spahr & Joshua Clover Architecture - Sarah V. Schweig Fear Not (Provided You Fear) - Jacqueline Waters American Spring Song - Sherwood Anderson Vernacular Owl" - Thomas Sayers Ellis In Our Time - Muriel Rukeyser (tequila)" - Montana Ray Poem - Man Ray God & Country - Graham Foust

[theswitchpdx]

The things you loved

I lived to haunt you. To ask you to hold this oldest piece of human DNA beneath your tongue—it’s shit dug up from wave- cut caves in the Summer Lake basin of Oregon, mixed with red fox, wolf, coyote—animals they ate or later came to pee on their remains. Hold this and think the thing you love the most what you most want inside you, mixed in with your excrement in fifteen thousand years when someone digs it up. Think the thing you loved so much you conjured it in labs to live inside the flesh of every animal to saturate your own well-fatted flanks, king of all the creatures. So these must be the names for things you loved so much you peed on all the earth and all its living things which you then ate to concentrate its thickest dose inside your pearl-white fat and rearrange your DNA and gene expression: aldrin, dieldrin, DDT, mirex, toxaphene, and TCDD. Heptachlor, hexa -chlorobenzene, and the PCBs nestled in your genes with you and chlordecone and the hexa -chlorocyclohexanes. All the things you loved.

                               by Allison Cobb

[theswitchpdx]

DON’T BE UPSET IF YOU DON’T HEAR FROM ME

Ranchers lease land from the government At very low rates That do not make up for the money spent by the government To manage the land for the ranchers Each rancher goes to sleep with a blanket It doesn’t stop there Ranchers get sex in places we don’t know about The sex is hot or good The sex doesn’t stop there Ranchers were so mad about 200 coyotes loose in their area So the government said OK we’ll shoot them from helicopters When the coyotes died it was OK Because animals die all the time they are used to it You like this cake I’ll cut you a slice A sliver It’s just a worthless sliver If it were me I would be more circumspect about it I would be less going on about it I’d tear its branches off and act like I hadn’t thought about it Decorate the tree half and shove it out there to sit

                                     by Jacqueline Waters

[theswitchpdx]

The Switch presents poets Allison Cobb and Jacqueline Waters.

When: Saturday, August 16, doors at 6 p.m., reading at 6:30 sharp. FREE Where: IPRC, 1001 SE Division St., Portland, OR

Jacqueline Waters is the author of One Sleeps the Other Doesn't (Ugly Duckling Presse) and A Minute without Danger (Adventures in Poetry). Recent poems have appeared in Fanzine, The American Reader, Everyday Genius and With+Stand. She edits The Physiocrats, a pamphlet press, and lives in Brooklyn.

Allison Cobb is the author of Born2 (Chax Press) about her hometown of Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Green-Wood (Factory School) about a nineteenth-century cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. The New York Times called Green-Wood “a gorgeous, subtle, idiosyncratic gem.” She is at work on Plastic: an autobiography, a hybrid genre work, and a poetry manuscript called After we all died. 

[allisoncobb]

Cori Copp reads for The Switch PDX

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Maryrose Larkin & Anne Shaw, 5/24, 6 p.m., Hazel Room

The Switch presents poets Maryrose Larkin and Anne Shaw. When: Saturday, May 24, 6 p.m. FREE Where: The Hazel Room, 3279 SE Hawthorne Blvd, Portland

Maryrose Larkin lives in Portland, where she works as a freelance researcher. She is the author of Inverse (nine muses books, 2006), Whimsy Daybook 2007 (FLASH+CARD, 2006), The Book of Ocean (i.e. press, 2007), DARC (FLASH+CARD, 2009) and The name of this intersection is frost (Shearsman Books, 2010) Marrowing (Airfoil, 2010) and The Identification of Ghosts (Chax, 2013). Maryrose was a founder of Spare Room, a Portland-based writing collective, and is co-editor, with Sarah Mangold, of FLASH+CARD, a chapbook and ephemera poetry press. Maryrose received her MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School of Art. She keeps her friends close and her muses closer. +

Anne Shaw is the author of Dido in Winter (Persea 2014) and Undertow, winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky Poetry Prize (Persea 2007). Her poems and reviews have appeared in Harvard Review, Denver Quarterly, Crab Orchard Review, The Los Angeles Review, Barrow Street, and New American Writing. She has also been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and From the Fishouse. A graduate of Yale and George Mason University, Shaw is currently a student of sculpture at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. She and her pit bull enjoy scaring small children and eating chicken bones from under picnic tables.

by Maryrose Larkin from ‘cure fraction’

the stranger

in the margins soft & rooted

her ideas wandering

as is her habit

her house has eaten me & kept me in awe

by Anne Shaw “New Architecture” & therefore the windows in which you must move through hallways or rooms, their jittery comeuppance, their glossy tabletops. What is a standard occupation. No, really, define this. Is it self- reliance? Conduit or spoon? That scrubbrush ain’t done with its teething, its ache for, its hot mess. I too have spent whole ages under the kitchen sink erect with your comings and goings, my bristles tuned to the latchkey & playing your favorite song. But this is how the body fails its rest. In my eyes there are tiny funnels. In my ear there’s a small, gross space. Meantime the grasses. Lakelight. Creatures in the dirt-mounds. Small things. Burrowing, shining.

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The Switch presents Corina Copp from Brooklyn and Mazarine Treyz from Portland.

When: Wednesday, April 9, 7 p.m. FREE

Where: The Hazel Room, 3279 SE Hawthorne Blvd, Portland

Corina Copp is the author of The Green Ray (Ugly Duckling Presse, forthcoming fall 2014), and recent...

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"More better than glitter." - Lindsey Boldt reading for The Switch.

(photo: Allison Cobb)