Time for History

Tuesday, May 2nd:
Time for History by Todd Colby
Book Launch and Reading
At Picture Room

7 - 9 pm
117 Atlantic Avenue
(between Henry and Hicks)

Please join us to launch Todd Colby’s beautiful new artists' book, Time for History. The book, published as a limited edition of 24, compiles a collection of found postcards overlaid with short handwritten phrases of poetry. The postcards' historic scenes are dominated and undercut by Colby's distinctive cocktail of humour, aggression, absurdity and poignance; reading concomitantly as an ode to the beauty of American culture, and as a guttural response to the current political climate.

"While working with the postcards I see myself as an architect, a vandal, a sculptor, a landscape artist, and a twister of reality. Whether I am making a monument to a poet or adding a plume of dots over a building, I feel myself entering the landscape as a trickster would and making it new by changing it to the way I'd prefer it to be."
– Todd Colby from an interview with Fred Sasaki in Time for History.

Colby will be reading alongside poet Billy Cancel and a special print of artwork from the book will be raffled off at the event to benefit Planned Parenthood.


Reading begins at 7:30.


Todd Colby is the author of six books of poetry, most recently, of Splash State (The Song Cave, 2014) and Flushing Meadows (Scary Topiary Press, 2012). He was the editor of the poetry anthology Heights of the Marvelous: A New York Anthology (St. Martin’s Press, 2001) and serves on the board of the Poetry Project. He was the lead singer for the critically acclaimed band Drunken Boat.

Billy Cancel's work has recently appeared in Boston Review & Pouch. His chapbook PSYCHO'CLOCK is out now on Hidden House Press. A full length collection MOCK TROUGH RASPING CROW will be released by BlazeVox later this year. Billy, with Thursday Fernworthy also make up the noise band Tidal Channel.