Dolan Morgan’s Chapbook Release Reading
Black Spring Books
Williamsburg, Brooklyn
Oct. 13, 2023
Black Spring Books is famously situated in a building once occupied by the legendary Henry Miller (a literary figure I’ll give you my honest opinions about in private; at a later date; far, far away). The store has been amply profiled in The New York Times and other publications, so for those in the know there’s not much left to be said.
For those not in the know, here’s the necessary information: It’s a great shop, a necessary shop — cozy and featuring a beautifully muraled backyard where readings are hosted at night and, most assuredly, contemplation is done during the day. Small, stacked to the ceiling, as well curated as one could possibly hope for a used bookstore to be — I even found a vintage volume of Brian Jacques’ prequel to his Redwall series, a grand work of epic children’s fantasy, a modest scholar’s cross between Tolkien and The Wind in the Willows, I devoured in middle school — All to say, and all have said it: in a landscape of corporate and failing bookstores, Black Spring is a sight for sore eyes, what every reader with a few bucks in their pocket is looking for.
However, regardless of venue, the success of a live reading hinges upon the folks reading. This may seem a bone-headed and obvious observation to make — what performance doesn’t live and die by the quality of its performer? Readings are, perhaps, a special case. They lack spectacle. The experience can border on ephemeral, spectral: Monotone mutterings, hazy registers, content performed without the context of the object it was written to fill … everything is vapor and dissipation… so many times after a reading I walk away with nothing but the ghost of the show over my shoulder, haunted by passages largely unremembered…
Not so with the release party for Dolan Morgan’s most recent chapbook, Annual Ethereal & Non-Corporeal Existence Conference.
Morgan, an excellent writer and kindly modest host, as excited about his fellow readers as he was for the release of his own work, closed the show with the solid delivery of several hilarious pieces of conceptual prose-poetry — well-practiced, confident of voice, and, most importantly, heartily crafted.
From a longer piece titled, Easy to Advanced Hand Puppets — I. The Hungry Rabbit: “You want to be a puppeteer? Then acknowledge the needs and desires of the rabbit you have forced to be alive using only a rag. The rabbit did not ask for this. Not any of it. The rabbit just woke up here […] It cannot eat, because it’s made of cloth, and it has only fingers for organs. Knuckles for lungs? It’s like a horror movie. Imagine that the hand that made you is also somehow the very substance of your being and the thing that obstructs all your desires. Sound familiar?”
I honestly would have sat through an hour’s performance of his pieces alone. But, he had good reason to share the evening, and good reason to be excited about sharing it.
As an opener, one could hardly do better than booking the likes of Carlos Jimenez, whose charming, funny, and sometimes deeply sad poetry was read largely from memory, an impressive feat in-and-of-itself.
From the poem Servicejob:
She pukes into my cupped hands
lets out a gack and some phlegm
then the bulk in a burst […]and she peels her eyelashes off
places them in the puddles
and they float on top
pretty tiny skinny canoes
I take it away with haste.
Reader, you’ll have to pardon my overquoting — the show was word for word top tier…
It wasn’t all poetry, no. Tracy O’Neill read from a memoir whose style, dense and winding, felt true to the act of untangling one’s briary personal history — unsentimental, but gleaming with tarry truths.
The other standout, mentioned last only for the sake of savor, was Sara Lippmann. Lippmann is a literary craftsperson of the highest order whose reading featured a certain variety of diamond-cut and exacting prose that is, by me, sorely missed on the new fiction shelves of contemporary bookstores. Some gems for those haunting the show by way of this review: “By the end of our junior year, we’d given up team sports. I don’t know if Sally was trying to stick it to her father, or just feeling lazy, feeling the endings of things, but what she did was her life, I was not her keeper.”
Or “Back then his hair was the color of Tang and cut in a bowl […] like the wind would knock all the seed pods from a gum tree and his hair would swing to its rightful place.” Or the simple beginning, a hook if I’ve ever heard one: “The day the two aircraft collided into Marion elementary, we went to Eric Frank’s after school…”
This overarching excellence was not the only element of the evening that rendered it memorable: Upon entering the store, while making one’s way to the backyard, one noticed, displayed on the shelves, atop stacks of books, pieces of paper listing position descriptions and qualification for employment — job listing for any ghosts that may be in attendance — Invisible Persons Needed and Haunting Requests. Playful and Halloween‑y, Morgan’s Job Fair for Ghosts concept is ultimately a gesture of admiration and kindness … for these listings were commissioned from writers in the scene that he himself admires. To not only program three great performers during the live set, but to also give nearly 25 other artists room to shine even in their absence is, well… a rare thing… done beautifully in a spirit of collaboration that is increasingly needed in this city’s fractious literary world…
