Event Description

Join Lindsay Hargrave & Noah David Roberts in conversation with Alejandro Santana as they discuss their new books, Computer Baby and What I Do in the Dark, what it means to be a poet, their writing processes, & how to go about releasing a book in today’s poetic landscape.

Bios:

Lindsay Hargrave is a poet, editor at Graphic Violence, and a copywriter for Temple University. Proceeds from their debut chapbook ROT (2022) benefit ARC Southeast. The follow-up, Computer Baby, is available now from Bottlecap Press. Read more at linktr.ee/Hargrave or follow @notporkroll on Twitter.

Noah David Roberts (they/them) is a non-binary poet and artist attending University of the Arts. Roberts is the author of four poetry collections: Us v. Them, Strips, Slime Thing [and other poems], Final Girl Mythos, and What I Do in the Dark. Roberts has poems published in Anti-Heroin Chic, Tribes Magazine, Horror Sleaze Trash, and more. Their instagram handle is @the.apocalypse.poet.

Alejandro Santana. A nobody looking for something who has done it all just to feel alive, because it is better to feel something than nothing at all. Alejandro was born in the Dominican Republic but has been living in Philadelphia for the past eight years, always following the American dream while looking for a taste of real life.

About the Books:

“What I do in the Dark along with its author, Noah David Roberts, are “incomplete poem[s] of humanity” channeling Keats and Baudelaire through streets soiled with raw emotions, patrolling nights that reject the dawn to chronicle the trauma of fellow dreamers. Open eyed and defiant, as honest as our nightmares are honest, the message here is love, love in an uncategorizable incarnation, love as a blunt object, love as flesh, love in the darkness.” – James Minnis, NDR’s mentor

Book description on the publisher’s website: “Computer Baby is not a book but a print screen of the author’s psyche. Like machine code, the software input looks completely different from the images projected on the screen. More literally, it’s a short chapbook consisting of a series of poetic experiments with word and thought.

Taking inspiration from the culture and tech environment of the 2000s, the author presents us with a brain rendered in grayscale. To create these poems, a network of memory entered the poet’s brain for processing, and what you are reading are the literary outputs of such experiments. In Computer Baby, what you see is never what you get.”