[Brooklyn]

Gregoire Pam Dick book launch with Genya Turovskaya and Anselm Berrigan
November 22, 2014, 7:00 pm
at Berl's Poetry Shop

NYC launch of Gregoire Pam Dick's METAPHYSICAL LICKS featuring Dick along with Genya Turovskaya and Anselm Berrigan.METAPHYSICAL LICKS, a hybrid prose-poem/novella riffing on the lives and works of Austrian poet Georg Trakl and his sister, Grete, is the restless new work by writer and translator Gregoire Pam Dick [a.k.a. Mina Pam Dick, Jake Pam Dick et al., author of DELINQUENT (Futurepoem, 2009)]. With a mix of high and low, tragic and comic, abstract and concrete, artifice and confession, Dick's playful writing takes risks. It transposes Georg's Grete (musician, fellow addict and suicide) to current-day Greta, gives her Wittgenstein and Kafka as other brothers, and betroths her (unhappily) to Nietzsche. Crossing New York City with Vienna and Berlin, it composes dissonance from urban moments, narrative fragments, and philosophical remarks. The inventive, androgynous, sexually loose (and intermittently incestuous) persona of Greta expresses itself through the surreal and haunted imagery of Trakl's poems. Readers will be drawn to Dick's combination of girl/punk/genderqueer rebelliousness and intensely questioning thought, in a text where creativity alone offers escape and exultation, and subjectivity keeps changing its sounds. Genya Turovskaya is the author of several chapbooks: Calendar (UDP 2002), The Tides (Octopus Books 2007), Dear Jenny (SUPERMACHINE 2011), and New Year's Eve (Octopus 2011). Her poetry and translations of contemporary Russian poets have appeared in Chicago Review, Conjunctions, A Public Space, Octopus, jubilat, and other publications. She is the translator of Aleksandr Skidan's Red Shifting (UDP 2008), and with Stephanie Sandler is the translator of The Russian Version by Elena Falainova, winner of the 2010 Best Translated Book Award for Poetry by Three Percent. She has been the recipient of various awards and fellowships including a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, a Montana Artist Refuge Fellowship, the Witter Bynner Translation Residency at Santa Fe Art Institute, and a Fund for Poetry grant. She holds an MFA from Bard College and lives in Brooklyn, New York. Anselm Berrigan earned a BA from SUNY Buffalo and an MFA from Brooklyn College. His collections of poetry include Integrity & Dramatic Life (1999), Zero Star Hotel (2002), Some Notes on My Programming (2006), and Free Cell (2009). He coedited The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (2005) with Alice Notley and Edmund Berrigan. Berrigan was the recipient of a 2007 poetry fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. He directed the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church from 2003 to 2007 and is cochair of the graduate writing program at Bard College. More information here.