Alli Warren Tangent Intro, Portland, 2/28/09

Tom Fisher, Alli Warren & Brandon Brown gave one of the best readings I’ve been to in Portland on Saturday, bringing down the variegated house with poems in the form of email apologies, wolf teats swollen with political allusion, and bathrooms in secret perpendicular to Levinas. Intro for Alli:

So far as I can tell, Alli Warren sprung fully formed from the head of Santa Cruz. Whatever magic first pulled her up the 101 has since distributed itself across many chapbooks, readings, parties, direct-to-cassette recording sessions, and after-hours banjo jams. I love Alli’s poems for their bruised and vulgar eloquence, like Dante’s but with God and the Italians left out. The Emperor appears sometimes, but only to be taken down, and it’s the whole ethos of the take-down that Alli seems to take on in her work, connecting the everyday language of the BART taunt or advertorial surround to the larger geo-political horn honking that makes up our episteme’s grammar. Alli’s poetry helps me to imagine what it would sound like to honk back. I’m glad she’s made it up the I-5 to bring the noise for us—please welcome San Francisco’s favorite parthenogene, Alli Warren.