412 E. 6th St
The Poets 4 Unity monthly reading series was held from December 2016 through April 2017 in response to the 2016 presidential election outcome. The series showcased Bloomington’s diverse voices to build solidarity during those first five post-election months. Poets 4 Unity now returns to co-host with the Writers Guild at Bloomington a special edition featuring Tony Brewer, who will read from Homunculus, his most recent book of poems (Dos Madres, 2019) featured in the April 2019 issue of The Ryder Magazine. Come and enjoy a cozy after hours evening of poetry over excellent Runcible Spoon fare!
Homunculus will be available for $17.00 per copy.
TONY BREWER is a poet, event producer, voice actor, and live sound effects artist from Bloomington, Indiana. He is Executive Director of the Spoken Word Stage at the 4th Street Arts Festival, and his books include: The Great American Scapegoat (self-published, 2006), Little Glove in a Big Hand (Plan B Press, 2010), Hot Type Cold Read (Chatter House Press, 2013), and Homunculus (Dos Madres Press, 2019). His work has been anthologized in And Know This Place: Poetry of Indiana (Indiana Historical Society Press, 2011), and Writers Resist: Hoosier Writers Unite (Chatter House Press, 2017). Tony co-founded the first poetry slam in Indiana in 2001 and competed, coached, and toured with a team until 2006. He is a literary consultant, a sound effects artist, and a regular voice for Cricket’s Bone Caravan audio theatre, which has won awards from the Kansas City HEAR Now Audio Fiction and Arts Festival and the Indiana Society of Professional Journalists. He has produced and recorded for the lit programs Books Unbound, and The Linen of Words, on WFHB community radio; and Anthology and The Poets Weave on WFIU public radio. He was made a Kentucky Colonel in 2012, and has won numerous awards, earning national recognition for his live sound effects work. Tony has been offering Poetry On Demand at coffeehouses, museums, cemeteries, churches, bars, and art and music festivals for over 10 years, and he is one-third of the poetry performance group Reservoir Dogwoods. By day, a mild-mannered book compositor at Indiana University Press, Tony also appears on the 2017 album Paris Suite, and frequently collaborates with experimental audio collective Urban Deer.
From the publisher’s website:
A homunculus is a bunch of things masquerading as a single entity. The little being inside your head watching the movie you are making of your life. Sensation and emotion distilled into a metanarrative of consciousness.
In psychology, a homunculus is a model of the asymmetrical space body parts occupy in the brain. In alchemy, it’s the tiny fully formed human alive in the sperm that makes a person who they are. Mary Shelley’s Promethean creation in Frankenstein is also a homunculus, a constructed simulation with a soul, as is the misshapen golem of Jewish folklore. Shades of mandrake, Caliban, Grendel, orcs. Modern internet trolls.
But we are not post-truth. All truths are contingent. My Homunculus is a collection of voices angling for Truth: smug, optimistic, freaked out, dignified, wretched, cruel, bellowing, bitching, whispers of rumors of The Big T. I am here too, unreliably so, parsing the noise made by disparate souls.
https://www.dosmadres.com/shop/homunculus-by-tony-brewer/
The featured reading will open with Joan Hawkins and Adam Henze.
JOAN HAWKINS is Chair of the Writers Guild at Bloomington, and Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies in the Media School, Indiana University Bloomington. She has written extensively on avant-garde, experimental, and art cinema. Her books include Cutting Edge: Art Horror and The Horrific Avant-Garde (U of Minnesota Press, 2000); Downtown Film and TV Culture 1975-2001 (UK: Intellect Press, 2015); and with Alexander Wermer-Colan, William S. Burroughs Cutting up the Century (forthcoming IU Press). She has co-organized two large conferences dedicated to experimental film, literature, art and music: The Burroughs Century (2014), and Wounded Galaxies 1968 (2018). She is currently editing two anthologies on 1968 radical aesthetics, and a monograph on independent and experimental horror. Her creative work has appeared in Sand, 3:AM, Performing Arts Journal, and n+1.
ADAM HENZE is a PhD student in the Literacy, Culture, and Language Education Department at Indiana University, and an Associate Instructor in the English Department, and at the Student Academic Center. His primary research interests are hip hop and spoken word pedagogy, critical literacy, juvenile justice, and youth literacy genres such as comics and video games. Adam is also a teaching artist and poet, lecturing and performing in over 30 U.S. states, Canada, Puerto Rico, Ireland, and England. His poetry has appeared on PBS’ Main Street and NPR’s Marketplace, and he has published a book of poems Written in the Dish Pit (Chatter House Press, 2013). Adam is also an organizer in the slam poetry community; the instructor for a yearly summer writing series at the Indiana Women’s Prison; and the director of a poetry writing and performance camp for high school youth. In 2016 Adam was named the Official Poet of the Indianapolis 500.