Young Thing: Book Launch & Reading

Young Thing: Book Launch

Doors & Music: 8 pm

Readings: 8:30 pm

Revealry: 9:30 pm

Join us to celebrate the launch of Young Thing and hear poems from the collection. There will be saxophone loops, readings, and general revealry at Molasses Books in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

About the Artists

Grace Bialecki is a writer, editor, and workshop facilitator based in Detroit. She has taught hundreds of workshops on writing, creativity and mindfulness for places like Hugo House, Brooklyn Public Schools, The Peace Education Center & Detroit Horse Power. Her fiction and essays have appeared in numerous publications including Catapult, The Millions, and Epiphany Magazine where she was a monthly columnist. Grace has performed her poetry at KGB Bar, Salmagundi Club and on radio Woodstock WDST, and she plays saxophone in the duo, river bend river.

Alex Brook Lynn is a multi-disciplinary artist who works in photography, video, writing, sound, and performance. She draws inspiration from growing up in NYC, in a household weighted by mental illness and incarceration. Her work is also informed by her years as a journalist and documentarian inundating herself with the city.

About the Project

Sometimes when we look back on old photos, it’s hard to recognize the person we once were. Young Thing flips back through an album of memories and re-writes these formative moments into tragicomic prose poems — exploring these times, and the work it takes to leave them behind. By playing with structure, language, and memory, this collection asks if we can unlearn what we were raised to be.

Includes original photographs by Alex Brook Lynn

“Stay up late reading and rereading Bialecki till your pulse beats behind your eyeballs. These poems are flash exorcisms (sometimes flashy) of airports and beds from the turn of the century that ultimately extend fathomless grace.” – Mara Faye Lethem

"In these poems, Bialecki sifts through the wreckage of early adulthood — addiction, romance, exile, return — with a diaristic candor that refuses to flatter or excuse. The collection is a coming-of-age for a generation raised on Cosmopolitan tips, narcotized by pills, and still trying to find a language equal to their hungers. Young Thing makes vivid just how memory itself becomes a kind of narcotic — addictive, corrosive, impossible to quit." – Brandon Harris

“Reading this book inspires us to live our lives with our emotional radar aiming at intellectual and spiritual or metaphysical heights only we ourselves can reach through ruthless revision, not only of the poems themselves but of ourselves.” – Malik Ameer Crumpler

Simply can't wait? Order the book here.