R. Nemo Hill and Wendy Chin-Tanner Read for Carmine St. Metrics, May 6

Quincy Lehr · #1 04-21-2012, 03:35 AM

Join us on May 6 at 6 PM for a reading by R. Nemo Hill and Wendy Chin-Tanner

at

The Bowery Poetry Club, 308 Bowery, New York, NY

R. Nemo Hill was born in Massapequa, on Long Island, in 1955, to a pair of legendary circus performers who were forced to retire after a terrible accident involving a trapeze, a plastic spoon, a runaway elephant, and seventeen Quaaludes. Barred for the rest of their live...s from performing in the Public Arena, they trained their only son from an early age in the Arts of the High-Wire, the Trampoline, and the Human Cannonball. Having failed to distinguish himself in any of these fields, his parents insisted that he become, instead, a poet. And though he proved to have more of an aptitude for verse than circus performing, this new vocation failed to generate much of an income. And so one dark day Mr. & Mrs. Hill traded the boy for several trained poodles and abandoned him to take their new act on the road.
Left to his own devices he has been writing ever since. He has published three books: Pilgrim’s Feather, an illustrated novel in collaboration with painter Jeanne Hedstrom; The Strange Music Of Erich Zann, a book-length poem in heroic couplets based upon a short story by H.P. Lovecraft; and a chapbook, Prolegomena To An Essay On Satire. His next book, a collection of poems entitled When Men Bow Down, is forthcoming from Dos Madres Press.
He is also the editor of a very independent chapbook press, EXOT BOOKS. Yet rumor has it that sometimes, late at night, after a few bourbons, he still practices his Human Cannonball Act—attempting to perfect it as a sort of emergency measure should his career as poet or editor stall anytime in the near future.

Wendy Chin-Tanner’s first collection Turn has been a finalist and semi-finalist for several prizes including the 2010 Washington Prize and the 2011 New Criterion Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in such journals as The Mays Anthology of Oxford and Cambridge, The Saint Ann’s Review, The Raintown Review, Praxilla, Melusine, Mascara Literary Review, Umbrella, Softblow, and Lantern Review. She is a founding editor at Kin Poetry Journal, poetry editor at The Nervous Breakdown, staff interviewer at Lantern Review, and online sociology instructor at Cambridge University, UK.