Events

[POETRY] Experiencing a poem by Aaron Kunin is like biting down on tinfoil—sharp, painful, and more than a little awkward. His poems come at you with wit, wry humor, and relentless honesty, refusing to look away from whatever mundane horrors they light on. “Sigh no more, moron, sigh no more!” begins one poem; another begins, “Last to know, and out of the mind, always. / …Out of the mind, and wrong from the start”—a sentiment to which we likely can all relate, even as the poem plunges us in media res into some obscure interior crisis. This is what Kunin’s poems do: Deceptively simple in diction and seemingly straightforward in construction, they nevertheless form a passageway though which the reader or listener enters into a Lynchian dreamscape where everything is slightly, tantalizingly askew. Kunin’s recent books include The Sore Throat & Other Poems (2010), Grace Period: Notebooks 1998-2007 (2013), and Cold Genius (2014). He’ll read at Hallwalls on Wednesday, April 1.