Poetic Research Bureau

05/19/2026

04/22/2026

Wednesday, May 6
Doors: 7pm
Reading: 7:30pm

The Poetic Research Bureau presents the Los Angels launch of imogen smith's "raw & zero" from Nightboat Books. With Gabrielle Civil, Misha Crafts, alma valdez-garcia, and Miguel Gutierrez.

Occupied with trans spirituality, the genocide in Palestine, and the manifold intricacies of q***r love and struggle, the poems in imogen smith’s second collection, raw & zero, open up an unabashedly musical incitement. At the heart of this collection lies the tensions between the philosophical and the erotic. Language unspools throughout long form pieces influenced by concrete poetry, as the poet plays with a sense of shape, space, and symbols. With raw & zero, smith charts medical transition, a budding Islamic practice, and civic resistance, felt in the book’s themes of meaning-making, hope, love, lust, identity, and community alongside personal, regional, and global grief.

imogen smith is a poet and tr*******al. She is the author of raw & zero and stemmy things, both published by Nightboat Books. They believe in a free Palestine, a borderless world, and trans power.

04/14/2026

Thursday, April 30
Doors: 7pm
Reading: 7:30pm

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The Poetic Research Bureau presents the Los Angeles launch of Blood Brother by Lily Lady, published by House of Vlad Press. With Kyle Greenberg, Jack Skelley, Jon Lindsey, Benjamin Weissman, John Tottenham, Michelle Tea, and Siena Soltis.

Blood Brother poems cycle through plateaus of grief and remembering. Sometimes the lost brother is willfully summoned but sometimes his image recurs in the most unexpected places. The poems in this book are magnetic and fragile.”—CHRIS KRAUS, author of The Four Spent the Day Together and I Love Dick

“The poetry of Lily Lady is a leather-gloved hand that grabs your hair as you pass a dark alley pulling you into a world of brutal tender earnest life you never want to escape.”—TEA HAČIĆ-VLAHOVIĆ, author of Give Me Danger

“To have had a family is to be haunted. In Blood Brother, Lily Lady busts into memory’s haunted house, excavating, investigating. These poems are tender and eerie, deeply searching, with an eye for detail so sharp it hurts. Literally write anything you want and put my name on it, I love this collection. xoxox”—MICHELLE TEA, author of Free Love: Adventures in Marriage and Polyamory

“These are like very detailed songs about the morose and ludicrous and hopelessly sexy time the poet is writing from.”—EILEEN MYLES, author of a “Working Life” and Chelsea Girls

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LILY LADY is an artist and filmmaker from New York City. Lily’s feature film, Sam’s World, is available through Factory25; Lily’s full-length poetry collections are NDA (Far West Press, 2024) and quickie (Dream Boy Club, 2022).

04/14/2026

Doors: 7pm
Reading: 7:30pm

The Poetic Research Research Bureau presents the Los Angeles launch of Sophie Appel's Mud Swallow from Bottlecap Press. With Ben Babbit, Ali Eyal,

03/29/2026

Celebrating the Los Angeles launch of Alexis Almeida's new book, Caetano, from Ugly Duckling Presse. With Corina Copp. Tuesday, April 7, 2026. Doors 7pm. Reading 7:30pm.

03/19/2026

Tuesday, March 31
7pm

The Poetic Research Bureau hosts a reading and book launch for Constance Debré's Offenses, out this month on Semiotext(e) press. Curator and writer Fiona Alison Duncan will join Constance in a Q&A after the reading.

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Constance Debré left her career as a lawyer to become a writer. In addition to Love Me Tender (Semiotext(e), 2022), she has written three other novels: Play Boy (Prix de la Coupole 2018), Un peu là, beaucoup ailleurs (winner of the 2005 Prix Contrepoint), and Manuel pratique de l'idéal Abécédaire de survie.

Fiona Alison Duncan is an author, curator, and the founding host of Hard to Read, a literary social practice. Her books include Ex-Best Friends (2025), Pippa Garner: Act Like You Know Me (2023), and Exquisite Mariposa (2019), winner of the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Fiction. Duncan is a founding member of the Estate of Pippa Garner.

This event is made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.

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“I find Debré's exquisite achievement not to reside in the realm of advice or guides for living. It’s in that cold sliver of voice, conducting electricity at a high voltage, sending the occasional shower of sparks off the page.”

—Christine Smallwood, Bookforum

“If Debré's novels were monotonously cynical or grim they would be far less pleasurable to read. They are brutal, but they are also something more—and that is very, very funny.”

—Anahid Nersessian, The New York Review of Books

03/18/2026

March 28, 1911 7th Ave., Los Angeles

02/24/2026

Sunday, March 1
Doors: 4:30pm
Event: 5pm

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The Poetic Research Bureau presents a talk and discussion for Jennifer Scappettone's new book Poetry After Barbarism: The Invention of Motherless Tongues and Resistance to Fascism.

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Against a backdrop of xenophobic and ethnonationalist fantasies of linguistic purity, Poetry After Barbarism uncovers a stateless, polyglot poetry of resistance—the poetry of motherless tongues. Departing from the national and global paradigms that dominate literary history, Jennifer Scappettone traces the aesthetic and geopolitical resonance of “xenoglossic” poetics: poetry composed in the space of contestation between national languages, concretizing dreams of mending the ruptures traced to the story of Babel. As global migration, aerial bombardment, and the wireless telegraph shrank distances with brute force during the twentieth century, visions of transcultural communication emerged in the hopes of bridging linguistic difference. At the same time, evolving Fascist ideologies denied the reality of cultural admixture and the humanity of the stranger.