This event has been ended!
Poetry Book Launch - Christopher Crawford — plus special guests
Event by: Chris Crawford
Location: Café Pavlač, Víta Nejedlého 23, Praha 3
About event
Join us for the Prague launch of Christopher Crawford's debut collection of poetry, Divorcee Disco Music, at Café Pavlač on Wednesday May 14 at 7pm.
With a reading by the author plus special guest poets:
Joshua Mensch, Stephan Delbos, and Clint Margrave.
Good times, drinks, plus poetry readings by a solid lineup of international poets.
See you there!
------------------------------------------------------------------
"Many of these poems bring a sweetly melancholy, poignantly surreal world to life where “trams softly crack their / knuckles over the tracks,” and a table “kneels now —uncovered— / in a room lit with laughter, // surrounded by the broken pieces / of all it tried to lift.” Crawford is a poet who is willing to look, without recoiling, at complicity, to reckon with the accidental violences we inflict one upon the other and still to go on singing, “breathing in and out behind the darkness like a jazz singer, her lips / on the mic.”
—Francesca Bell
------------------------------------------------------------------
Lineup of Readers
Christopher Crawford’s poems have appeared in The Scotsman, Agenda, The Rumpus Online, Plume, Puerto del Sol, Rattle, and The Cortland Review. Born and raised in Scotland, and an ex-offshore oil worker, he lives in Prague where he edits B O D Y (bodyliterature.com) and works in the digital tech industry. His first poetry collection, Divorcee Disco Music, was published by Blue Diode in 2024.
Clint Margrave is the author of several books of fiction and poetry, including the poetry collections Salute the Wreckage, The Early Death of Men, and Visitor, all from NYQ Books. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Threepenny Review, The Sun, Rattle, and Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. He is currently a 2024-2025 U.S. Fulbright Scholar living in Sofia, Bulgaria. When not abroad, he lives in Los Angeles, CA.
Joshua Mensch is a poet, literary translator, and a founding editor at B O D Y. His first book of poetry, Because: A Lyric Memoir (W. W. Norton, 2018) was a finalist for Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Award in Poetry. His most recent translations include Petr Hruška’s I Caught Sight of My Face, (Kulturalis, 2024), illustrated by Czech painter Jakub Špaňhel, and Pavla Melková’s The Gravitational Field of the Inexpressible (KANT Books, 2022), a collaboration with British sculptor and visual artist Antony Gormley.
Stephan Delbos is the former Poet Laureate of Plymouth, MA. His poetry, essays, and translations have appeared internationally. He is the author of Light Reading (BlazeVOX, 2019), Small Talk (Dos Madres Press, 2021), and the chapbook In Memory of Fire (Cape Cod Poetry Review, 2017). Delbos co-translated The Absolute Gravedigger by Vítězslav Nezval, which won the PEN/Heim Translation grant, and also co-translated Woman in the Plural (Twisted Spoon, 2021). He edited From a Terrace in Prague (Litteraria Pragensia, 2011) and wrote the scholarly work The New American Poetry and Cold War Nationalism (Palgrave). His plays Chetty’s Lullaby and Deaf Empire were produced in San Francisco and Prague, respectively. He is a founding editor of B O D Y.
With a reading by the author plus special guest poets:
Joshua Mensch, Stephan Delbos, and Clint Margrave.
Good times, drinks, plus poetry readings by a solid lineup of international poets.
See you there!
------------------------------------------------------------------
"Many of these poems bring a sweetly melancholy, poignantly surreal world to life where “trams softly crack their / knuckles over the tracks,” and a table “kneels now —uncovered— / in a room lit with laughter, // surrounded by the broken pieces / of all it tried to lift.” Crawford is a poet who is willing to look, without recoiling, at complicity, to reckon with the accidental violences we inflict one upon the other and still to go on singing, “breathing in and out behind the darkness like a jazz singer, her lips / on the mic.”
—Francesca Bell
------------------------------------------------------------------
Lineup of Readers
Christopher Crawford’s poems have appeared in The Scotsman, Agenda, The Rumpus Online, Plume, Puerto del Sol, Rattle, and The Cortland Review. Born and raised in Scotland, and an ex-offshore oil worker, he lives in Prague where he edits B O D Y (bodyliterature.com) and works in the digital tech industry. His first poetry collection, Divorcee Disco Music, was published by Blue Diode in 2024.
Clint Margrave is the author of several books of fiction and poetry, including the poetry collections Salute the Wreckage, The Early Death of Men, and Visitor, all from NYQ Books. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Threepenny Review, The Sun, Rattle, and Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. He is currently a 2024-2025 U.S. Fulbright Scholar living in Sofia, Bulgaria. When not abroad, he lives in Los Angeles, CA.
Joshua Mensch is a poet, literary translator, and a founding editor at B O D Y. His first book of poetry, Because: A Lyric Memoir (W. W. Norton, 2018) was a finalist for Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Award in Poetry. His most recent translations include Petr Hruška’s I Caught Sight of My Face, (Kulturalis, 2024), illustrated by Czech painter Jakub Špaňhel, and Pavla Melková’s The Gravitational Field of the Inexpressible (KANT Books, 2022), a collaboration with British sculptor and visual artist Antony Gormley.
Stephan Delbos is the former Poet Laureate of Plymouth, MA. His poetry, essays, and translations have appeared internationally. He is the author of Light Reading (BlazeVOX, 2019), Small Talk (Dos Madres Press, 2021), and the chapbook In Memory of Fire (Cape Cod Poetry Review, 2017). Delbos co-translated The Absolute Gravedigger by Vítězslav Nezval, which won the PEN/Heim Translation grant, and also co-translated Woman in the Plural (Twisted Spoon, 2021). He edited From a Terrace in Prague (Litteraria Pragensia, 2011) and wrote the scholarly work The New American Poetry and Cold War Nationalism (Palgrave). His plays Chetty’s Lullaby and Deaf Empire were produced in San Francisco and Prague, respectively. He is a founding editor of B O D Y.