Letterforms, bull testicles, Worcester's new bookstore

New England Literary News

Praise the Katherine Small Gallery. Praise the small and strange. Praise the specific and the niche. It’s a gallery. It’s a bookstore. It’s so small. The light is so good. It focuses on typography and design. You don’t have to know anything about either to find delights there. This week, they’re holding one of their Standing-Room Only lectures, short talks on graphic design, typography, and collecting. This go-round brings Stephen Coles to K. Small. He’s the Editorial Director and Associate Curator at Letterform Archive in San Francisco, the publisher of Fonts in Use and Typographica, and he’ll be rapping about prefab letterforms. Two other Katherine Small recommendations: One! The dispatches proprietor Michael Russem sends out are smart and funny and a model of what internet communication should be. Again, you don’t need to be a typography nerd to think they’re good and to learn new things and to be seduced by the shapes of certain letters. Sign up here. Two! Earlier this year they published the final issue of Design Brief, their beautifully produced pocket-size publication, this one on grave rubbings of the graves of dead type designers. We’ve all got a one-way ticket to the boneyard. Fonts live on.

The Standing-Room Only lecture takes place Monday, March 31 at 7 pm at Katherine Small Gallery, 108 Beacon Street in Somerville. Tickets are $10. For more information, click here.

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Heather Treseler moves between the earthy and the ethereal in her new collection, Hard Bargain (Lily Poetry Review Books), and does so with verve and grace. She opens in pasture, the speaker approaching a bull, “his testicles, lonely clapper of a bell, a rump / five or six times the size of her skull.” Bullish musk and horned pursuit carry through the book. “There is no one rutting season,” Treseler observes. For the women speakers of these poems, the girls they were are never far off, making themselves remembered in their cusping complexity, their not-quite-ness but coming-soon. These poems explore what it means to inhabit, a place, a family, an apartment, a history, a body, and the desire that flames now and then to escape those very places and states. We’ve got Leda here, Daphne and Demeter, Europa, Venus, Persephone, mythic metamorphic forces. There’s want here, too, Treseler knows the language of desire — a “scallop / shell glowing like a vulva given / back to its own pleasure” — and knows, too, language’s limits — the “terror in the long staircase between words, / syntax no banister.” We topple through our wanting, our reluctant or headlong becoming and coming, our escapes and near misses and succumbings, in our ongoing metamorphoses. “Religion,” Treseler reminds us, “makes formal the desire for transformation.”

Treseler will read from and discuss the book on Friday, April 4 at 8:30 am as part of the Consulate General of Ireland’s Speaker Series. The event is free, but registration is required. Address will be disclosed upon registration. You can register here.

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“Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it,” wrote psychiatrist and political philosopher Frantz Fanon. It’s the guiding sentiment behind Implacable Books in Worcester. Last year, Addison Turner, co-founder of the Worcester Youth Cooperatives, a mutual aid fund emphasizing the inclusion of youth voices, started the pop-up bookstore, focusing on books on the anti-imperialist, New Afrikan Liberation, and feminist movements. After a year of mobile here-and-there encounters, Implacable Books will move into a permanent home this week. Serving as a bookstore, gathering place, and reading room, they aim to ask and answer challenging questions, and “be hospitable to individuals and groups that contribute to and want to learn from the rich experiences of liberation struggles worldwide, especially those pertaining to captive nations within US borders and women.” Implacable Books is at 189 Washington Street, in Worcester. For more information, click here.

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Baseball gets talked about as inspiring the writers, but I think soccer’s got the most poetry. I don’t usually write about sports, but had the chance to go see Maine’s new team, the Portland Hearts of Pine, play against an amateur team from Cambridge in the U.S. Open Cup, the oldest soccer tournament in the country, with more magic in 90 minutes than a season’s worth of balls and strikes. I wrote about the mighty misty game here. The Hearts of Pine play again this Wednesday night in Round II of the Open Cup. See you there?

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Bookseller’s Best: Staff Picks from New England independent booksellers
Douglas Riggs at Bank Square Books in Mystic, Connecticut, recommends Grey Bees by Andrey Kurkov, translated from the Ukrainian by Boris Dralyuk (Deep Vellum): “Sergey, a Ukrainian beekeeper, lives in the 'grey zone' carved between his native land and the western separatists in Donbas. One of two remaining souls in a village where shells sail overhead, he cares only for his bees. This propels him on a journey away from home to a place where his bees can forage in peace. There is unease and menace all along the margins but somehow Sergey navigates it all with an innocent simplicity that ingratiates him with locals and pisses off bureaucrats and cops.”

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Books of Note Out This Week
Journey to the Edge of Life by Tezer Özlü, translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely (Transit).

Then Then Then by Scott Daughtridge Demer (Kernpunkt).

The Night Trembles by Nadia Terranova, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (Seven Stories).

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