Irene Solà is a writer, artist and filmmaker. She was born in Malla, near Barcelona, in 1990. She has a BA in Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona and Listahaskoli Island, Reykjavik, and an MA in Literature, Film and Visual Culture, from the University of Sussex. Solà's first poetry collection Beast was awarded the Amadeu Oller Poetry Prize and was published by Galerada Editorial (Catalunya) and Shearsman Books (UK). Her first novel The dams was awarded the Documenta Prize and was published by L’Altra Editorial, 2018. Solà is part of the anthology Wretched Strangers (Boiler House Press, 2018) edited by J.T. Welsch and Ágnes Lehóczky and Mig segle de poesia catalana (Editorial Proa, 2018) edited by Vicenç Altaió and Josep M. Sala-Valldaura. Her writing has also appeared in Murder Magazine, Poetari Magazine, VOLS RUSSOS Artzine and Lighthouse.
Beast is a darkly imaged, startling and lyrically precise exploration of gender, identity, sexuality and multiple forms of desire.
“Beast enters incisively, like claws. It arrives with gleaming fur and stinking. It’s a creature that spills its guts and impels the same from others—peoples, animals, limbs, foodstuffs, logical thinking, familial and sexual relations. In Irene Solà’s scenes, there’s nothing that isn’t jammed together and insecure but what’s constant is temperament. Beast comes swiftly, with a brazen laugh and cocked ears. Watch out when the lines pause for weird and possibly lethal detours. As Solà jolts, pulses and pushes off, she might leave the paths littered with bouquets or corpses.” —Heather Phillipson
“Sensuous, precise, and profoundly generous in their glimpses of strikingly private narratives, Sola’s poems feel perfectly placed for the strange heat of our times…” —Ben Rivers
“After drinking orange blossom water until she vomited everything that she had inside her, the writer and artist Leonora Carrington wrote that her stomach was ‘the mirror of the earth’. Solà’s Beast has a duckling in the belly; the words it makes her sick up are evil, brittle, full of feeling. I’m excited to see this translation from the Catalan unleashed on UK poetry.” —Sophie Collins
Lisa Marie Basile is a poet, essayist and editor living in NYC. She studied English and psychology as an undergraduate at Pace University and received a Masters in writing from NYC’s The New School. She's the founding editor-in- chief of Luna Luna Magazine (an online magazine & community dedicated to literature, witchcraft and idea). She is the author of a few books and chapbooks of poetry: Apocryphal, war/lock, Triste, and Andalucia. Her book NYMPHOLEPSY (co-authored with Alyssa Morhardt-Goldstein) will be published by Inside the Castle in November 2018. It was a finalist in the 2017 Tarpaulin Sky Book Awards. She is also working on her first novella, to be released by Clash Books in 2019. Her first nonfiction book, Light Magic for Dark Times, is just out from Quarto Books.
Kim Vodicka is the spokesbitch of a degeneration and heart-reactionary at the rearguard of the rose arts. She is the author of two full-length poetry collections: Aesthesia Balderdash (Trembling Pillow Press, 2012) and Psychic Privates (White Stag Publishing, 2018), as well as a poetic comic book series (Oily Pelican Press, 2015) and a chapbook of sound poems on vinyl (TENDERLOIN, 2017), both of which are also called Psychic Privates. Additionally, she is the author of The Elvis Machine (The Artist Commons, 2018), a chapbook of illustrated poetry. Her poems, art, and essays have been featured in Spork, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Makeout Creek, Luna Luna Magazine, Paper Darts, Tarpaulin Sky, Best American Experimental Writing, Nasty!, I Am Strength, and many others.
Berl’s Brooklyn Poetry Shop is New York's only all poetry bookstore. Owners Jared White and Farrah Field envision Berl's as a new kind of bookstore, not a dense hive of shelves but a friendly, curated selection of small press books, a personal celebration of great writing with a special platform for handmade and limited edition works handmade by writers and publishers that often slip under the radar. They hope to be, in a sense, a museum for the poetry they love, human-scaled, offering visitors entry into a wonderful secret and a welcoming family.
