Thanks to the Brooklyn Flea!

Berl's will always be so grateful to our friends at the Brooklyn Flea for giving us a home for our shop over the last two years and they very sweetly have just posted an interview with us about the new storefront on their website, here. Big thanks to them for all the support! Here's a pic from the interview:

Lots of new books coming in over here - new chaps from Ypolita Press in San Francisco, c_L in Portland, Little Red Leaves in Houston, and a slew of UK pamphlet micropresses thanks to Justin Katko. Come check them all out- we'll be open for afternoon preview hours over the next four days, with two events to boot, Thursday and Saturday evenings. See our calendar for more info about this and more.

Suspended in Greatness

Lately at the Flea we have been carefully hanging books so that you can see them. Last week we featured books by the press Mindmade Books, edited by Guy Bennet. Mindmade books makes beautiful chapbooks and it was so lovely to see them all displayed together. We especially enjoyed hanging up Franklin Bruno's MF/MA and Chelsey Minnis's Foxina.

Next week we will display chapbooks from the Belladonna* Collaborative. Among many titles, we will have Bhanu Kapil's (a poem essay, or precursor: NOTES: for a novel: Ban en Banlieues) hanging against the summer sky. We will also have Latasha N. Nevada Diggs's Manuel is destroying my bathroom..., which is a selection from her forthcoming book, My Life as a Boy, soon to be published by Belladonna. Come out and peruse these wonderful chapbooks!

Featuring, Us!

Big news this week at Berl's! First of all, we are featured today on the Brooklyn Flea web site, with lots of background about the shop as well as a couple new poems by the two of us! The Flea has been very good to us and we're so grateful for all their support.

Secondly, this weekend we're pulling special double duty; not only will we be out as usual in Williamsburg on the waterfront on Sunday 7/24, but we're also going to be out in force all day on Saturday 7/23 at the Popsickle Poetry Festival at the Gowanus Ballroom, 55 9th St., starting at 1 pm and going well into the evening. We're very excited to be part of this unique event, which features many, many great poets and presses and should be totally rollicking.

Next week, speaking of Berl's special events, we will be making the pilgrimage to Governor's Island all weekend for the New York Poetry Festival. We'll keep you posted about this as we make our way over there for the event and for the first time Berl's Brooklyn Poetry Shop will exist beyond the borders of the Borough of Brooklyn (though we'll be just across the beautifully named Buttermilk Channel).

UPDATE: Thanks very much to the staff of the Harriet blog at the Poetry Foundation for the kind shout out to Field and White aka Berl's! Inspired by both articles' mentioning the discussion of my grandfather Berl, I was googling this morning and found this interesting interview with the architect who worked with my grandfather, Harmon "Berl" White, building award-winning progressive, modernist houses in the 1950s.

Without This Bag At the Flea

Well, I spent nearly all day trying to figure out how to make handmade bags for our Flea customers to carry away their newly purchased poetry. The bags turned out to be kind of time consuming and not durable. So maybe I'll save them for gifts, which is what they were initially meant for. If you want to learn how to make your own gift bag, this is a pretty good tutorial.

Don't forget to come visit us this Sunday, March 6th. We will be at the Flea all day. Come get some poetry!