Barrelhouse Presents is our monthly reading series at Petworth Citizen in Washington, DC. It's our chance to share work from writers appearing in literary magazines and small presses we love. On Friday, September 5th at 7 PM, Barrelhouse Presents Aforementioned Productions with readings by Dolan Morgan, Carissa Halston, and Randolph Pfaff.
What is Aforementioned Productions? Everything. It’s a small press that publishes books and chapbooks. It’s a print magazine. It’s an online magazine. It’s a reading series. It puts on theatrical productions. It’s the brain child of Carissa Halston and Randolph Pfaff.
In the latest print issue of apt, Aforementioned Production’s literary magazine, there’s a poem called “Blowing Bubbles” by Pat Hanahoe-Dosch that begins, “The stick bugs keep sticking to the backdoor screen / Please advise.” From there it continues though three more stanza with stranger and stranger scenarios ending with “Isn’t it time to visit the dead? / Please advise.” In a gesture of poetic turn and smart layout, the poem continues on the next page with responses from the first speaker’s interlocutor with advice and information:
Stink bugs have no known predators here in the US.
Have you learned to live with them? Don’t breathe
when you crush them…
This advice is reassuring; a comfort after the rising paranoia of the first section, but this too takes a darker turn. Just when you’re feeling good about this poem and it’s fireflies and Fourth of July, the interlocutor strike you with her final advice:
If the dead have been digging in your garden,
it’s time. It’s just time.
All we know is still brown fog.
In other words, it’s a roller-coaster of a poem. It makes you feel all the feels. And that’s what Aforementioned Productions is all about—publishing great writing that affects a reader.
Tomorrow night, Carissa and Randolph will be at Petworth Citizen in person to talk more about their press/magazine/culture-generating organization and Dolan Morgan, editor of the Atlas Review, will read from his new collection of short stories That’s When the Knives Come Down which just came out from Aforementioned Prodcutions. I hope we’ll see you there, too.
Not in DC? Want more information? Check ‘em out at aforementionedproductions.com.