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Open Mic Highlights
• First off, a word of appreciation to our contingent from Worcester, Artemis (“We don’t restrict ourselves to Onlys”) and Bailey (“Sunlight making crowns across my body”) who have often been the first two people on our open mic the past couple months. Thanks for opening our show up in style!
• Soon there will be an official BPS Wolves correspondent, giving you updates on all the latest wolves-themed poems and wolves-variant poems that are now happening every single week on the open mic! This week Emma and Abby M (with Quolls subbed into for wolves) added excellent work into this archive that gets stronger with each passing day.
• We got to hear work from regulars that we haven’t heard from in a while, including Helena (“sometimes you walk into a room with open eyes on purpose,”) Otto Vock (Who wrote about the poets who work diligently to keep up their poetry-related education gigs even while they are constantly being taken away from them”) and Jade Kleiner (an erasure of “War of the Worlds” turned into a mediation on inheriting their mother’s mania)
• March’s raw and therapeutic piece on how chronic pain continues to wreak havoc on their life and the places they manage to escape it
• During the smoking section, Aparna wrote thoughtfully on how “the elephant in the room” is actually feeling, and Amy got to do a reprise/re-working of their Chicago Rathole poem that incorporated both the Cantab/BPS and their parents (who were both in the room!)
Feature
We had an open poetry slam this past week, and there was no shortage of heavy hitters who are already in peak season form! We had great work from newbies Kay (“Do you reach into the rubble and grow?”) and Len, while slam veteran Stevie Subrizi brought us polished mini-poems on trans-synthesizer legend Wendy Carlos and how trans defiance can be intertwined with the lyrics to The Pretenders’ “Brass In Pocket”. Our final pairing came down to the visiting Muzat (who has been giving us extremely strong and raw memorized work while they are in town this month from Texas) and 2026 BPS team member Mugs Myers. Both qualify for the 2027 team selection, with Mugs taking home the win and the $75!
Coming Up This Wednesday
This week, you won’t want to miss a feature from one of our favorite out-of-town poets, Hieu Minh Nguyen! We’ll also have our extended open mic and our monthly Haiku Slam (you’ll need 3 haiku for a chance to win $17.) See you there!
Feature Bio: Hieu Minh Nguyen is the author of three poetry collections, including This Way to the Sugar (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014), Not Here (Coffee House Press, 2018), which won the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry from the Publishing Triangle, and Staying Still (Tin House Books, 2026). His honors include the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, a McKnight Writing Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship. He earned his MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Originally from the Twin Cities, Hieu lives in Oakland and is a Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University.
– MFG 🚪
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