The Buffalo launch event for Margaret Saigh’s I’ve created a thing that will never bring me pleasure (Pitymilk Press) happens at Fitz Books on Thursday.

Thursday, March 12, 3 p.m. to 4:30 p.m.: University at Buffalo Poetics Plus Series Lecture “beyond felt facts: documentary assemblages, nomadic translations, and global crises” by Joanna Mąkowska. UB Poetry Collection, 420 Capen Hall, Univversity at Buffalo North Campus. Free and open to the public.

Moving between the interrelated practices of poetry translation and poetics research, Mąkowska’s talk will first take up her translations into Polish of Natalie Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen and then discuss her current book project on documentary assemblages as a form of protest and resistance.

Tracing the documentary impulse from the 1930s (Boyle, Rukeyser, Loy) to contemporary anti-war archival poetics in global context (Ammiel Alcalay and Ida Borjel), Mąkowska will also discuss how theories of montage, assemblage, and new materialism illuminate documentary literature’s polyvocal and processual nature.

Joanna Mąkowska is an assistant professor at the University of Warsaw, a literary critic, and a translator. She has translated into Polish Claudia Rankine’s Citizen and Natalie Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem (Ossolineum Award nominated). Her essays have appeared in Modernism/modernity, Arizona Quarterly, Women’s Studies, The Routledge Companion to Ecopoetics, and elsewhere. Having been a Fulbright Scholar at the University at Buffalo and a Postdoctoral Fellow at Duquesne University, she is currently a visiting professor at Canisius University.

Thursday, 6 p.m.: Poetry readings by Mara Beneway, Jazz De Nero, and Margaret Saigh in celebration of the Buffalo chapbook launch event for Saigh’s I’ve created a thing that will never bring me pleasure (Pitymilk Press, 2025). Fitz Books and Waffles, 1462 Main St. in Buffalo. The event is free and open to the public.

About the Poets

Mara Beneway is a writer, visual artist, and teacher from Western New York. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Bennington Review, Conduit, The Minnesota Review, Foglifter, and elsewhere. Her collection of linked flash fiction, Grandma June, won the Flume Press 2021 Chapbook competition. She holds an MFA from the University of South Florida and is currently working on her first full-length collection of poetry, DAUGHTERS OF LILITH.

Jazz De Nero is a Buffalo-based poet, visual artist, media-maker, collagist, and zinester. Her work can be found in Voicemail Poems, Perhappened Mag, Queen Mob’s Tea House, Peach Mag and numerous other publications. She was a finalist for the 2019 Write Bloody Book Publishing Contest. Her debut chapbook, You Should Have Seen The Water, was published in 2021 by Bottlecap Press. This poem appears in the chapbook, along with another poem “In the Museum” that was recorded at the Silo City Reading Series in 2021 and appears on Just Buffalo Literary Center’s YouTube Channel.

Margaret Saigh is the author of the chapbooks I’ve created a thing that will never bring me pleasure (Pitymilk Press, 2025) and CROSSED IN THE DARKER LIGHT OF TERROR (dancing girl press 2022) as well as other chapbooks. She is the creator of circlet, a poetry workshop and reading series. Her writing has been published widely in print and across the web. She received an MFA from the University of Pittsburgh. Saigh is also a teaching artist for Just Buffalo Literary Center.

Sunday, March 15, 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.: Book launch event for My Spanglish Es Impecable (Kelsay Books) by poet Lynn Ciesielski. Pucho Olivencia Community Center, 261 Swan St, Buffalo, NY 14204-2051

The evening will feature a reading with Lynn Ciesielski accompanied by Michael Mendoza on Spanish guitar, book sale, book signing, and sales of her new book, My Spanglish Es Impecable. Free and open to the public. Food and beverage available for purchase through the center.