Mon 16th June
6.30-9pm
Please join us to celebrate the publication of three new books: Alan Gilbert’s ongoing epic poem, The Everyday Life of Design; Karla Kelsey’s Transcendental Factory: For Mina Loy, an innovative nonfiction exploration of writer and visual artist Mina Loy (1882–1966); and Francesca Wade’s Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife, which uses archival material to cast new light on Stein’s life and legacy. They will be joined by very special guest and award-winning poet Lily Blacksell.
Alan Gilbert’s The Everyday Life of Design opens wide to the world in a variety of styles and voices to document the received. Ranging fast and low across current social, physical, and media landscapes while trapped in a world structured to extract as much data and capital as possible, these poems inhabit precarious spaces while also seeking to elude them. The present 300+ page volume represents the second revised and expanded iteration of Gilbert’s ongoing magnum opus.
Combining experimental biography with fiction and fact, Karla Kelsey’s Transcendental Factory elevates networks, constellations, and tracings over conventional chronology. Known for the poetry she published in avant-garde magazines, Mina Loy also wrote novels, stories, plays, and genre-bending philosophy, while painting, creating assemblages out of trash, and designing lamps for her Paris boutique. Kelsey’s novel of Loy’s life creates a resonating space for the lost and undocumented.
Pushing beyond the conventions of literary biography, Francesca Wade’s Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife is a bold, innovative examination of the nature of legacy and memory itself, in which Wade uncovers the origins of Stein’s radical writing and reveals new depths to the storied relationship that made it possible. A captivating, brilliant work of biography, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife is a groundbreaking examination of a true literary giant.
Lily Blacksell’s Stressed, Tested is culled from poems Blacksell wrote when tuning into the Stress Test show on Soho Radio. Stressed, Tested brings together twenty-two poems showcasing a remarkable range of tone as well as emotional and conceptual material, all masterfully crafted under the most intense conditions.
Alan Gilbert is the author of the ongoing epic poem, The Everyday Life of Design, published in 2024 by Winter Editions. He is also the author of a collection of essays, articles, and reviews entitled Another Future: Poetry and Art in a Postmodern Twilight. He is the website editor for BOMB Magazine and adjuncts in the Columbia University MFA Writing Program.
Karla Kelsey is the author of Transcendental Factory: For Mina Loy, a lyric-documentary rendezvous with iconoclastic writer and visual artist Mina Loy (1882–1966), published in 2024 by Winter Editions. She is also the author of five books of poems and a collection of essays entitled Of Sphere. She is the Charles B. Degenstein Professor of English and Creative Writing at Susquehanna University.
Francesca Wade is the author of Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars (2020) and Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife (2025).
Lily Blacksell is a poet living in London. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Review, BOMB Magazine, Poetry Wales, and elsewhere. She runs a poetry and music night called Canon Fodder. Her two pamphlets are There’s No Such Thing (ignition press) and Stressed, Tested (Rough Trade Books).