Caroline Rayner, Joss Barton, and Jo Barchi Celebrate THE MOAN WILDSThursday April 18th, 2024 @ 7:00PM – 8:00PM
Join Caroline Rayner, Joss Barton, and Jo Barchi for a reading celebrating the release of Rayner’s book-length poem, THE MOAN WILDS!

Praise for The Moan Wilds:

“Steeped in the hybrid and maximalist tradition of C.D. Wright, Bernadette Mayer, and Alice Notley, The Moan Wilds nevertheless forges a path so inimitable it becomes the very thumbprint of its author, which to me is the crowning achievement of any book worth its salt. Here Rayner has produced an indelible and unforgettable voice, full of heart, intelligence, hunger and a wildness that shakes us into new, hallucinatory order. In other words, it’s fucking awesome.”

-Ocean Vuong

“The Moan Wilds is a queer feast.”

-Selah Saterstrom

Wine, honey, gin, benedictine, champagne, orange wine, bourbon, tequila, velvet and silk, meat, magnolia, ass, angel, bird dog, moon, swamp and shocks. It’s going to be magnificent and it’s going to end in wreckage.

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-Dara Barrois/Dixon (née Dara Wier)

Lighting fireworks in the yard during a party, then escaping into the house to cut your hair in the bathtub, or down the road to where everyone promised you could perfectly see the moon. Sharing a bottle of wine while riding through the Blue Ridge Mountains in the back of a station wagon with no air conditioning and nothing but weather and sports on the radio. It’s writing each other’s names on the windows with melting lipstick. Putting glitter on your eyes. Crossing your legs over her legs to make a move on a giant rock in the river. Getting blood on your dress. Sweating in pink sheets until noon with someone you got to sing “Someday I Will Treat You Good” then “Trains Across the Sea” then “Farewell Transmission” with at karaoke. Yelling on the phone from the porch about a psychedelic kind of light coming in like water but also like velvet through the magnolia that everyone needs to see to believe and we can make a whole goddamn night out of it if someone goes to get more wine.

Caroline Rayner is a writer and teacher from Virginia. She is the author of THE MOAN WILDS (Shabby Doll House, 2023). Her work can be found in Annulet, b l u s h, KEITH LLC, Peach Mag, and elsewhere. She currently lives in Western Massachusetts.

Joss Barton is a writer, journalist, and spoken word performance artist exploring and documenting queer and trans* life, love, and liberation. Her work blends femme-fever dreams over the soundtrack of the American nightmare. Combining prose poetry, non-fiction confessional essays, drag artistry, and spoken word stage performances, Joss examines the myriad states of queer trans womanhoods from historical, political, and pop cultural identities of death, desires, dreams, and disco.

Jo Barchi is a poet and editor living in Chicago. They are a Midwest Editor at Joyland Magazine. Their work has previously appeared in Tagvverk, Social Text Journal, Triangle House Review, The Poetry Project Newsletter, and We Want It All, an anthology of radical trans poetics edited by Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel, published by Nightboat Books.

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Tags: Caroline Rayner, Chicago, Jo Barchi, Joss Barton, Lower West Side, Pilsen Community Books, THE MOAN WILDS