Content:

Join us as we welcome Jay Besemer and Joe Hall to the store for a reading from their books On Being Half-Imaginary and Buffalo Free Rapid Transit.

About On Being Half-Imaginary:

An experimental, hybrid exploration of personal archives, memory, identity and time (travel), On Being Half-Imaginary mixes memoir with media studies to present a nonlinear tale of becoming oneself. With lines blurring between fictional and real, between past and future, between self and others, this book suggests that identity is as much about change and relationships as it is about self-definition and experience. Candid, sensitive, emotional and bold, the author presents a multidimensional life, lived uniquely and intimately--always in motion, always different.

About Buffalo Free Rapid Transit:

Joe Hall's intense and unsparing Buffalo Free Rapid Transit combines a darkly observant stroll through a crisis-plagued Rust Belt city with a love letter to the people trying to get by within it. These poems move through the years 2020–2023, when one American city became a recurring site of national horror: a police assault caught on camera, a white supremacist massacre, a blizzard that killed forty-seven people while emergency services failed. Hall grapples with decades of abandonment and disinvestment—and with what it means to keep living, coping, working, and dreaming in a place the rest of the country only notices during disaster. The long, searching lines come from the strange place where cold reality, dread, and visions of a better future crack open into each other.

Poet and artist Jay Besemer is the author of many books, most recently On Being Half-Imaginary and The Horse (Overneath Books 2026 and 2025 respectively). He lives, works and wanders in Chicago.

Joe Hall’s seven books of poetry include Fugue & Strike and Someone’s Utopia. Current Affairs on Fugue & Strike: “a remarkable poetic project, unlike anything else in literature today.” The Boston Globe: “Joe Hall’s poems move between a fist-pounding urgency, the fire and squelch of this moment of our endtime, and a vulnerability hushed and gentle as a nightgown on a laundry line.” Based in Buffalo, Hall has performed and delivered talks nationally at bars, squats, universities, and rivers. Protean Magazine, the Cleveland Review of Books, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Poetry Daily, Fence Digital, Mercury Firs, Annulet, dollar bills, and an NFTA bus shelter have all featured his writing. Community Mausoleum featured his essay “PEN America: Cultural Imperialism’s Avant-Garde.” Find more at http://joehalljoehall.com.