The Palace Reading Series
Greenpoint, Brooklyn
2/19/24
I do my best in these articles to avoid reviewing the same folks. In a city like this one there’s always plenty new to find if one is willing to do the necessary seeking out. However, there’s also a fair amount of tried-and-true staples, places and recurring events that function as carousels of variety and, in the best of cases, serve as centers of gravity for the development of social scenes. Marissa Cadena and Rita Puska’s Palace Reading Series is increasingly becoming one of these events.
I returned to the reading out of pure curiosity, to see how things had developed since my last time among the throng. Happy to say — joyed, truly — that Marissa and Rita have not only kept the thing going but have managed to turn the third Tuesday of every month into an event that anyone in NYC’s literary circles would be a fool to sleep on.
The bills they put together remain stacked, thematically consistent reader to reader, curated with eyes and ears toward style and content. But the real achievement is the warmth they have managed to maintain in the room. There’s no hipper-than-thou bullshit about what these two ladies are doing, no clout to chase, only a guarantee of great art and performances to make good on. And heavens do they ever make good on it.
I’d like to focus on two of the readers in particular: Stevie Chedid and Bonnie Hall.
Chedid first: Stevie, an MFA candidate in fiction at Sarah Lawrence, broke from what we all have to assume is her usual form and treated the audience to a personal essay. Though — and if you know my opinions on personal essays, you’ll know this is a compliment — the shapes and gestures of fiction were deftly woven through the piece’s tangential, fever dream narrative.
Jumping from the lonely howl of her gracefully monstrous wolfdog to the rich lands of grandfather’s orchard in Lebanon, the true fever-dream of a bout of a food poisoning served as the shaky ground on which Chedid firmly planted us. A crystalline prose sensibility served as the perfect guide through the disparate things Chedid needed for us to connect. Therein perhaps lies the true magic of Chedid’s work, this need to connect the little pieces, make the whole, reach true understanding.
Now, Bonnie to close it all out: It’s always a pleasure for me to hear another Southern voice in NYC, and I’ll tell you know, Bonnie Hall is the real, swamp-water deal. Voice inflected ever so subtly with Okefenokee twang, and a versifying tendency toward the Biblical, nostalgic, and bodied, Hall’s poetry and the character they wrote in their short story are full up with consequence and craft. The greatest compliment I can pay any writer is when their words read like they were fun to have written, and Hall deserves this praise through and through. Imagine now, just for a moment, being the person who, formerly blank page steadily filling, finds that these are the words one has managed to write:
Palms trace the loss and hold lack to my mouth: Pond water to wine.
But I never had to bear the cross. Fingers never found his side. The holes in my ankles are
bug bites
blistered in chlorine and spring sun.
I never wanted a rebirth.
I just want off this goddamn mountain.
The whole of their reading was situated in this register, this prophetic-ecstasy-meets-hayseed-ramble, unhurried for its being brimmed with things true enough to mean and speak slowly.
Kudos again, and forever, to the organizers. There’s tons of stuff going on in the NYC literary scene; it’s good to know that some of it is being done so well and thorough. So long as the Palace keeps doing what they’re doing, I’ll be able to tolerate no small amount of hipsterish bullshit. There’s always a castle to return to. Every third Tuesday.
