Release party for Cass’ chapbook, "Beauty Exasperated," which will be published by Common Meter Press in April 2024. Celebration & readings by Cass, Ally Ang, dana middleton, nanya jhingran, Haines Whitacre, & Sophie Johnson. The chapbook itself is a collection of fragmentary erasures of George Eliot's "Middlemarch," which explore constructions of beauty, desire, institutions that seek to formalize & control love, and loss.

Cass' chapbook and art prints will be available for purchase as well as a donation bar (proceeds to bar go to CAM programming).

*masks requested for launch party, and you are invited to wear a floral or dramatic outfit

About the readers & press : : 

Cass is a poet & artist with an MFA from University of Washington, Seattle. They have work published at Poets.org, in Gulf Coast, Washington Square Review, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art Online, River Styx, Salamander, Foglifter, & others. They are a 2023-24 Hugo House Fellow, and the host of an annual poets & artists retreat in Darrington, Washington.

Ally Ang is a gaysian poet & editor. Their debut poetry collection, Let the Moon Wobble, is forthcoming from Alice James Books in 2025.

Haines Whitacre lives in unceded Duwamish land. She’s written Haptic Verse: In Imaging Vessels (Burnside Review, Winter Texts), Accounts of Wreckage (Winter Texts), and Ali Mapu (Edipos Editorial), and a few other things. Her work’s nourished by two waterways—the Chesapeake Bay and the Salish sea—and musics on and off shore. She ties knots sometimes, calls it art; loves seeing exposed infrastructures; and tends to collect effluent language/symbols abandoned in the world.

nanya jhingran is a teacher, poet, and editor from Lucknow, India, currently living in Seattle on unceded Duwamish lands on the coastal margin of the Salish Sea. She is a tenure track faculty in English and Humanities at South Seattle College, serves as a mentor for the Seattle Youth Poetry Fellowship, and organizes the Critics at Large program at Poetry Northwest. Her writing is committed to the many absent-presences that share this world with us and can be found in Moss Literary, Poetry Northwest, Waxing, Canthius, The BOILER, and Seventh Wave, among others

dana middleton (they/them) spends their time organizing and connecting with incarcerated queer and trans people in WA, hanging out with worms, and doing a lot of gay country line dancing. They currently teach creative writing at UW Bothell.

Sophie Johnson is a poet from Oahu, presently residing in Seattle with her kitten.

Common Meter Press is a tiny analog-first micropress in Seattle and Portland that curates and creates poetry chapbooks, songbooks, anthologies, and more.