First Tuesdays Presents BK Fischer

When: March 7, 2017
Where: Espresso 77 Café, 35-57 77th Street, Jackson Heights, NY 11372.
Time: 7:00 — 8:30 PM (open-mic sign up at 6:30)
Cost: $5 minimum purchase at the food counter.
More Information: Richard Jeffrey Newman

BK Fischer is the author of two poetry collections, Mutiny Gallery, winner of the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize from Truman State University Press, and St. Rage’s Vault, which received the 2012 Washington Prize from The Word Works. Her third book of poems, My Lover’s Discourse, a remix of Roland Barthes’s classic text, is forthcoming from Tinderbox Editions in 2017. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Boston Review, FIELD, Blackbird, Barrow Street, Literary Mama, WSQ, The Hopkins Review, Western Humanities Review, Southwest Review, Ninth Letter, Posit, Ducts, Stolen Island, and other journals. Also the author of a critical study, Museum Mediations: Reframing Ekphrasis in Contemporary American Poetry (Routledge, 2006), she was a finalist for the 2014 Balakian Citation in Reviewing from the National Books Critics Circle. She holds a B.A. from the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars, an M.F.A. in poetry from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in English and American Literature from New York University. She teaches in the School of the Arts at Columbia University and is a poetry editor at Boston Review. Here’s a sample poem from My Lover’s Discourse:

“Virgin”

virgin / vierge

To love does not exist in the infinitive.

A Virgin Mary is a glass of tomato juice. A virgin can be a sign of the zodiac, the mother of Jesus, a female insect that produces an egg without being fertilized, a variety of apple or pear, a species of moth, or a cigarette made from Virginia tobacco. Virgin, adj., composed of or consisting of virgins. It takes until definition six to ungender it: a person of either sex in a state of chastity. Virgin bush: not under cultivation. Virgin voyage: first attempt, initial foray. A suite of lexemes, including virga, a strip of wood, and vireo—green, flourishing, or fresh. Split at the root: she is fresh. She is new and unspoiled. She is insubordinate, impertinent, rude. Virgin, when said of wool: not yet, or only once, spun or woven. Said of olive oil: first press. Said of metal: made from ore by smelting. Said of clay: not yet fired.

This event was funded in part by Poets & Writers, Inc. through public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.