BY JOANNA C. VALENTE
Button Poetry is one of the best and most innovative presses and organizations around right now. They run a video/reading series of poets performing their work, and it's so amazing. Reading poetry, of course, is a gift, but hearing poetry makes the words come along in a new way. Regardless of whether the poem is read by the poet who wrote it (or an admirer), it's an intimate look into who the reader is, since so much can be inferred by how fast or slow or soft or loud the reading is.
Here are five poets whose work I admire, and whose readings I could listen to over and over again:
1. Thomas Fucaloro
2. Roya Marsh
3. Aja Monet
4. Donte Collins
5. Patrick Roche
Joanna C. Valente is a human who lives in Brooklyn, New York, and is the author of Sirs & Madams (Aldrich Press, 2014), The Gods Are Dead (Deadly Chaps Press, 2015), Marys of the Sea (The Operating System, 2017), Xenos (Agape Editions, 2016) and the editor of A Shadow Map: An Anthology by Survivors of Sexual Assault (CCM, 2017). Joanna received a MFA in writing at Sarah Lawrence College, and is also the founder of Yes, Poetry, a managing editor for Luna Luna Magazine and CCM, as well as an instructor at Brooklyn Poets. Some of their writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Brooklyn Magazine, Prelude, Apogee, Spork, The Feminist Wire, BUST, and elsewhere.