Chapbook Release Party! I Wanted Just to Be Soft (April 2016, Anomalous Press) by Temim Fruchter
Featuring:
Temim Fruchter, author of I Wanted Just to Be Soft (April 2016, Anomalous Press) Seema Reza, author of When The World Breaks Open (March 2016, Red Hen Press) Plus, other surprises!
Come join us to celebrate the release of new work by DC writers!
About I Wanted Just To Be Soft:
I Wanted Just to be Soft is part anatomical travel log, part prayer book, part emotional collage and part new anatomy. This collection of lyric prose pieces is built from accounts of trying to find balance between hardening and softening, being guarded and being open, and learning, slowly and tenderly, about vulnerability, knowing one’s selves, and letting one’s selves be known. The arc of the book traces physicality, queerness, identity and relationship through the stories the body tells. Whether it’s an exploration of tear ducts, fingernails, shoulder blades or nude art modeling, each piece in the collection moves through the experience of being as present as possible for this world and not only all of its heartbreak, but also its wild and beautiful color.
About Temim Fruchter:
Temim Fruchter is a writer and artist who lives and loves in Washington, DC. She loves noodles every which way and believes in magic. She is co-founder of the Mount Pleasant Poetry Project, and her first chapbook, I Wanted Just To Be Soft, came out on Anomalous Press in April 2016. Her work has appeared in [PANK], Tupelo Quarterly, The Washington City Paper, The Account and the Tishman Review, among others. More attemimfruchter.wordpress.com
About When The World Breaks Open: “Seema Reza delivers. When the World Breaks Open is a searing song of motherhood, love and redemption through art. Her sons, the death of her marriage, the birth of her courageous artist self is a testimony in which she finds the skin, questions faith, reverberates a familial tongue and rises, yes—rises in a stumbling glory.”
—Mahogany L. Browne
“Reading When The World Breaks Open at first pleases; here’s a poet who actually took her time and gave the word integrity the serious treatment it deserves—after all, the book is infinitely universal, as it is about human relationship, love, betrayal, trust, defiance, empowerment, sorrow . . . one could go on; one respects not only her precise craft but also her thoroughness. . . . Read it, pass it on, share it with your friends, savor it, smell it, throw it, embrace it, pick it up and read a little and lay it down within reach to pick up another time—it’s one of those books, there when we need it to shed a little light on life’s ups and downs.”
—Jimmy Santiago Baca
About Seema Reza:
Seema Reza is a poet and essayist and the author of When the World Breaks Open (Red Hen Press, 2016). Based outside of Washington DC she coordinates and facilitates a unique hospital arts program that encourages the use of the arts as a tool for narration, self-care and socialization among a military population struggling with emotional and physical injuries. An alumnus of Goddard College and VONA, her work has appeared on-line and in print in Bellevue Literary Review, The Beltway Quarterly, HerKind, Duende, and Entropy among others. In 2015 she was awarded the Col John Gioia Patriot Award by USO of Metropolitan Washington-Baltimore for her work with service members.
