Avid Bookshop is pleased to announce a poetry reading and book signing with Ben Kopel and Kim Vodicka on Friday, June 29, 2012, at 6:30 pm.
Poet Kim Vodicka grew up in Lafayette, Louisiana and received her B.A. in English from UL Lafayette in 2010. She is currently working on her M.F.A. in Poetry at LSU, where she is also a Graduate Teaching Assistant and Co-Coordinator of Delta Mouth Literary Festival 2012. Kim is an avid lover of music, hosts a psychedelic rock show, "Shangri-La-La Land," on KLSU, and is involved in musical-poetic projects. She believes that poems want to be songs very badly, and she can recite most of her work from memory. She is the author of the self-published chapbook Hustle, featuring poems and collages constructed from pornographic literature. Her artwork has been published in Tenderloin, and her poems have been published in Shampoo, Ekleksographia, Dig, Spork (forthcoming), and RealPoetik (forthcoming). Aesthesia Balderdash (Trembling Pillow 2012) is her first full-length collection.
Ben Kopel was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 1983. He holds degrees from Louisiana State University, The Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and The University of Massachusetts Amherst MFA Program for Poets and Writers. He currently lives in New Orleans, Louisiana, where he teaches creative writing and English literature to high school students. He is the author of a chapbook, Because We Must (Brave Men Press), and his work has been published injubilat, Conduit, The New Delta Review, Makeout Creek, Everyday Genius, and elsewhere. Victory (H_NGM_N Books 2012) is his first full-length collection.
View videos of Kim reading here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfTtH4FvATc
View her artwork here: http://www.tender-loin.com/vodicka.html
Read Kim's interview with Tenderloin here: http://www.tender-loin.com/vodicka_interview.html
Read samples of her work
Here: http://ekleksographia.ahadadabooks.com/reed/authors/kim_vodicka.html
Here: http://www.shampoopoetry.com/ShampooThirtytwo/vodicka.html
And here: http://digbatonrouge.com/article/from-love-taps-4751/
Praise for Aesthesia Balderdash:
“Belatedly—like everything we wait for—Kathy Acker’s great, I mean really great, grand‐daughter appears…in Louisiana, naturally (or un‐naturally). Her ‘blood runneth cheesecake’ who penneth this collection of see-sick lyrics drunk w/ semantic play and painful as ‘all lights…even stars.’ Vodicka’s Aesthesia Balderdash sisters the disaster of gender in ways that matter: ‘chronically, / abashedly, / rosily, cockily, / dazzlingly.’ Not for the faint of art, this is poetry that cunts, I mean counts.”
--Laura Mullen
View the Victory teaser trailers and keep up with interviews and reviews here: http://partmutilationpartvictory.tumblr.com/
Read samples of poems from Victory here:
1. http://www.everyday-genius.com/2012/03/ben-kopel.html
2. http://www.lapetitezine.com/issue_28/ben_kopel_turn_off_my_face.php
3. http://bravemenpress.com/kopelsample.html
Read Ben’s ‘First Book’ interview with iO Magazine here:
http://iopoetry.org/archives/1222
Praise for Victory:
“Meteoric as pop songs, as fist-fights between best friends, Ben Kopel’s poems blaze out like declarations of love and vendetta spray-painted on overpasses. Victory is raw and tender as a crying-jag, while being full of a new savagery’s swagger and grace.”
–Dean Young
