Nov 14, 7-10pm

A launch party and reading to celebrate the release of Diana Hamilton's God Was Right and Shiv Kotecha's The Switch, with special guests Lucy Ives and Anselm Berrigan.

God Was Right collects poems that take the form of arguments, essays, and letters. The title poem argues that God was right to make us love cats (and then watch them die); another categorizes the way women like to be kissed; one proposes a sex ed that takes into account persuasion and pleasure; another argues men should write bad poetry; a letter tries to make friendship about love; a five-paragraph essay tries to disarm heartbreak via analysis; etc. These poems/essays are hyperbolic attempts to write something adequate to a feeling.

If nothing else, these poems will convince you that Hamilton has something genuinely distinctive, insightful, and important to tell us about poetic and theoretical discourse.—Craig Dworkin

The beauty (transformative capacity) of these poem essays is in how they further the possibility that she, and we, get to live more openly with our meanings restored—a farewell to abjection.—Stacy Szymaszek

The Switch compiles three books in one:

1 - an extended apology, in verse, for friendship and desire
2 - a fictional “obedience residency manual”
3 - a poem by the unlovable Lord fucking Shiva.

Shiv Kotecha does for the word fucking what Catullus did for the word kissing. In The Switch, desire travels everywhere to its surprisingly specific destinations—to body parts aroused in their fashion, like a saint’s skull or a cock. Here love is as artificial as a courtly dialogue, and deeply felt, even spiritual. Here the arousal of the fragmented body is contemporary practice. Is one allowed to write such a book? Among the spectacular effects and turns and startling intimacies in The Switch, the most daring is its no-holds-barred pursuit of love.—Robert Glück

Shiv Kotecha’s deeply weird and affecting book The Switch works with prosaic measure and measured prose to compress the mess of everyday sexual feeling, the mess of everyday relating (both on and off the planet of the genital) into these often perfect lines.—Hannah Black

Anselm Berrigan's books of poetry include Something for Everybody, just out from Wave Books, Come In Alone, and Primitive State. He is the poetry editor for The Brooklyn Rail, and editor of What Is Poetry? (Just Kidding, I Know You Know): Interviews from The Poetry Project Newsletter 1983-2009.

Lucy Ives is the author of the novel Impossible Views of the World, published by Penguin Press in 2017. Her second novel, Loudermilk: Or, the Real Poet; Or, the Origin of the World, will be published by Soft Skull Press in 2019. She also writes for various magazines and teaches in the Image Text interdisciplinary MFA program at Ithaca College, as well as at NYU’s Center for Experimental Humanities.

Diana Hamilton is the author of three books—God Was Right (Ugly Duckling Presse), The Awful Truth (Golias Books), and Okay, Okay (Truck Books)—and four chapbooks. Her poetry and critical writing have also appeared (or are forthcoming) in Works Off Paper (The Printed Room at SALTS), Art in America, Triangle House, Frieze, The Believer, Amodern, Tender, Revue svetovej literatúry, Lambda Literary, Social Text Journal, Bomb, and Prelude, among others.

Shiv Kotecha writes poetry, fiction, and criticism. He is the author of The Switch (Wonder, 2018) and EXTRIGUE (Make Now, 2015). Creative and critical writing can be found in Frieze, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. He is currently a PhD candidate in NYU English, finishing a dissertation titled Decomposition as Explanation: The Forms of Duration from Poe to Post-Conceptualism.