Literary

Peach Picks: Literary Recommendations for the Week

by / Jun. 14, 2017 12am EST

 ON PEACH: 

Last Friday at Peach we fittingly published “A Friday,” a short story by London-born, Glasgow-based writer Eliza Gearty. At first glance, the story follows a nameless female narrator as she walks home with a coworker, but it is much more than that. Through beautiful and expressive prose, Gearty communicates the painstaking awkwardness that comes with this kind of everyday situation. The story features descriptions of small talk, the careful way in which her coworker walked, and an uncomfortable dialogue about an impending doctor’s appointment, all told with an attention to detail that feels unique and fresh. “My heart was in my mouth,” Gearty writes, “and a stupid club song was in my head, making it hard to concentrate, to even say ‘see you later.’” Gearty masterfully twists what is often mundane into fun vignette of social experience.


 IN PRINT​:

what if there aren’t enough twitter notifications to solve this​

by el pearson

tenderness yea, July 1st 2017

Due out this summer from tenderness yea is el pearson’s new full-length collection of poetry, what if there aren’t enough twitter notifications to solve this. pearson, who is the author of the chapbook a nt (Bottlecap Press, 2016) and cofounder of Spy Kids Review and 2fast2house, recently left New Orleans to tour with fellow poets June Gehringer and p.e. garcia, and is stopping in Buffalo tonight to read at a Peach episode. pearson’s new book of poems straddles the panic not of where you are and where you want to be, but of how you are and how you want to feel. Many of the poems explore themes of self destruction, anxiety, and survival, as the speaker of the poems confronts their on-again, off-again relationship with themselves, their depression, and their internet presence. In a poem titled, “thought about jumping off the south street bridge & it made me cry,” pearson writes, “i matched with someone from / high school on tinder / she said i thought you fell off the / face of the earth / i said i did.” what if there aren’t enough twitter notifications to solve this aches with vignettes of crushes and loneliness, and is for the generation of poets who don’t scribble lines on bar napkins but who escape to the bar bathroom to type poems into the Notes app on their phones.


 IN TOWN​: 

It feels like summer can finally get started now that the Silo City Reading Series has had its season kickoff. A couple weekends ago, curator Noah Falck of Just Buffalo Literary Center welcomed visiting poet Mathias Svalina to an unfinished wooden stage in the Marine A grain silo following a multidisciplinary set of local openers; experimental musicians Cages performed a piece full of stomps and shivers composed specifically for the Silos, Mary Helena Clark of Squeaky Wheel presented her hypnotic and eerie film, Delphi Falls, that moved guests to unwittingly rub their heads and necks as the credits rolled, and poet Aidan Ryan read from his debut full-length collection, Organizing Isolation, out recently from Linoleum Press. Svalina is best known for the poetry he uncovers in dream logic, the captivating narrative form which many of his poems take, and for his Dream Delivery Service, a daily subscription through which he delivers his dream-poems, often by bike, to his many subscribers. Time and summer again, Silo City is made an exceptionally unique place for poetry and art—not just for the significant role that the grain silos play in the city’s history, but for the way the space’s acoustics make it so that the silos themselves are performing alongside the artists, or for how the light of the setting sun filters in through the industrial husk’s gaping holes, adding a distinct aura to each performance throughout the night. The series is in its fourth season, and will welcome visiting poets Morgan Parker and Maggie Smith to Buffalo later this summer.

 


“Peach Picks” is a column of literary news and recommendations written by the editors of Peach Mag, an online literary magazine based in Buffalo. For inquiries, contact the editors at peachmgzn@gmail.com.

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