A Different Kind of Poetry @ Book Suey

A Different Kind of Poetry

What happens when four wildly different storytellers walk into a cooperatively owned bookstore in Detroit with one goal:

Give you something you can FEEL.

A Different Kind of Poetry is not your traditional poetry reading. This is an intimate, 50-person experience featuring four Michigan artists whose work stretches across spoken word, storytelling, music, performance, culture, grief, Black joy, identity, healing, and everything beautifully human in between.

And we want to SELL. THIS. OUT.

For one night, Book Suey, a cooperatively owned independent bookstore in Detroit, becomes home to four distinct voices:

Marcel Fable Price is a nationally touring storyteller, former history-making Poet Laureate, author of New American Monarch, entrepreneur, and proud Michigander whose work lives at the intersection of grief, love, culture, community, and possibility. From PBS to Button Poetry, stages across the country to boardrooms and investment spaces, Fable believes everyday extraordinary humans are capable of far more than they've been taught to imagine.

Brittini Ward, aka Eye N Eye the Storyteller, is an Emmy Award-winning Detroit-born storyteller, poet, multidisciplinary artist, and founder of Eye N Eye LLC. Her work transforms storytelling into a practice of care, healing, and cultural preservation. Her projects include Many Tongues™, Baba Juke™, and the Detroit Poetry Archive™, and her work has reached audiences from The Kennedy Center and Detroit Institute of Arts to communities across the United States, Mexico, Kenya, and Honduras.

La Shaun phoenix Moore is a Detroit-based vocalist, spoken word artist, activist, culture creator, and one of the city's dynamic artistic curators. Her interdisciplinary work celebrates Detroit, Black joy, Black audacity, faith, and social justice. She has shared stages with artists including The Last Poets, Saul Williams, Franny Choi, Jamaal May, and Nandi Comer, and currently serves as a 2026 Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage fellow.

Toiryan Milligan is a Baton Rouge-born, Detroit-based spoken word poet and performer whose work blends layered metaphor, wordplay, and emotionally honest storytelling. Drawing from Black identity, family, masculinity, love, trauma, resilience, and healing, Toiryan turns everything from sports and games to ordinary objects and pop culture into unexpected windows into the human experience.

Four artists.

Four entirely different approaches to the craft.

One tiny room.

Only 50 seats.

Tickets are $20, with 100% of ticket revenue going directly to the four featured artists.

That matters to us.

You're not buying a ticket that disappears into some giant production budget. You're supporting working artists. You're gathering inside a locally rooted, cooperatively owned bookstore. And while you're there, we hope you'll browse the shelves, buy a book, support Book Suey, and put your dollars behind the kind of independent cultural spaces that make experiences like this possible.

Come support local.

Shop local.

Pay artists.

Then settle in, because we plan on giving you an EXPERIENCE.

We might make you laugh. We might make you uncomfortable. Somebody might make you cry. You might hear something you wish you hadn't because now you'll be thinking about it for the next three business days.

That's kind of the point.

This is A Different Kind of Poetry.

And there are only 50 opportunities to say you were in the room.