Blake Stephens, Julia Terese, Brad Gruezke, and Darrell O’Neill read at the Highland Coffees Reading Series, where caffeine and poetry are both heavily drank.

Blake introduces you to an old childhood friend—that discomfortingly insightful who knows far too much about you.  Julia’s fiction feasts like poetry, smacking its lips to distant clinking and swearing.  Its gestures are rhythmic and undulating.  Both Julia and Blake featured in this year’s Delta Journal, available at Cottonwood Books in April.  In addition, this is the first reading of the series that begins to branch out from Delta Journal’s core staff into some new voices from Baton Rouge.

“Darrell and Brad are really terrific,” according to LSU professor of poetry (and official Friend of Delta Journal) Lara Glenum.  “Darrell spins dark and sensual dreamscapes in which existential questioning is tinged with gothic horror. Kafkaesque, yes, but totally contemporary. His poems burrow and squirm their way through landscapes of decay.” And of Brad, “[he] produces hilarious (and intensely visceral) narrative sequences that chart calamitous topographies. His poems often perform masculinity in cheeky or explosive ways. A total delight. I want to eat his poems.”