Save the date! Metro Rhythm Presents: The Blue Angel Reading Series will have its first event of the season on Friday, September 30, 2011, at 8:00 p.m.

The event will be autumnal. The poetic bounty, fecund. Our readers, stellar. Katie Byrum. Martin Rock. Genevieve Burger-Weiser. Montana Ray (occasioning a chapbook release celebration). Josh Bell. Don’t miss this.

As usual, we will be at Blue Angel Wines, where Kym and crew have a lovely selection of bottles for you to buy, and the verse flows into plastic cups and ears alike!

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Josh Bell’s book of poetry is No Planets Strike. His poems have appeared in such magazines as 9th Letter, The Awl, Boston Review, Hotel Amerika, Indiana Review, The Manchester Review, Triquarterly, Verse, and Volt. His poems have been reprinted in the recent anthologies Legitimate Dangers, Imaginary Poets: 22 Master Poets Create 22 Master Poets, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Seriously Funny, and Third Rail: Rock and Roll Poetry (MTV Books).

Montana Ray is a feminist writer & mother. Her gunpoetry is appearing in La Petite Zine, Lana Turner, and her chapbook from dancing girl press, (guns & butter), which will be available for the first time at Metro Rhythm. Ray’s fiction appears in Narrative Magazine.  Her translations of the early work of Spanish poet Francisca Aguirre are forthcoming in Asymptote Journal and in her chapbook, The Other Music: Selected Poems from the 1970s, published by Argos Books and to be launched at Camel Art Space on October 2.

Martin Rock‘s poems have been published or are forthcoming in Conduit, DIAGRAM, Forklift, Ohio, No Dear, Salamander, The Tampa Review, and other journals. His collaborative chapbook with Philip D. Ischy, Fish, You Bird was published by Pilot Books and his full length collection, New Country, was a recent finalist for Sarabande’s Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry.  He is managing editor of Epiphany, a literary journal, and Editor in Chief of Loaded Bicycle.  He lived in Japan for three and a half years and can again feel “the wandering” shaking in his bones.

Genevieve Burger-Weiser‘s poems have been published in Boston Review, Western Humanities Review, Washington Square Review, Juked magazine and CRATE. She was a finalist for the Poetry Foundation’s 2009 Ruth Lilly Fellowship, a winner of Poets & Writers’ 2009 Amy Award, and shortlisted for the Times Literary Supplement 2008 Poetry Prize. She contributes book reviews to TheThepoetry Blog, teaches at Manhattanville College, and makes her home in Brooklyn, NY.

Katie Byrum is in her 2nd year of the poetry MFA program at Hunter College. You can find her recent writing in Forklift, Ohio; Gulf Coast; and Lumberyard Magazine. It has also appeared in subway cars and abandoned phone booths; on airplanes headed for Dublin, Milwaukee, and Tampa; and inside egg cartons at Whole Foods.

And what’s more: “Bell, Ray, Rock, Burger-Weiser & Byrum” isn’t just our list of readers. It’s our dancing instructions for the inevitable after-party.

Don’t forget to RSVP on Facebook, and we’ll see you there on the 30th!