Buffalo Free Rapid Transit
at Writers & Books (740 University Ave, Rochester, NY 14607)
and available in a virtual livestream: livestream tickets here.
Joe Hall will be joined in conversation by poet Albert Abonado
Joe Hall’s intense and unsparing Buffalo Free Rapid Transit combines a darkly observant stroll through a crisis-plagued Rust Belt city with a love letter to the people trying to get by within it. These poems move through the years 2020–2023, when one American city became a recurring site of national horror: a police assault caught on camera, a white supremacist massacre, a blizzard that killed forty-seven people while emergency services failed. Hall grapples with decades of abandonment and disinvestment—and with what it means to keep living, coping, working, and dreaming in a place the rest of the country only notices during disaster. The long, searching lines come from the strange place where cold reality, dread, and visions of a better future crack open into each other.
Joe Hall was first taught poetry by Lucille Clifton, Jeffrey Coleman, and two decades of bad jobs. Buffalo Free Rapid Transit is his sequel to the critically acclaimed Fugue & Strike (2023), which Current Affairs calls “a remarkable poetic project, unlike anything else in literature today.” Protean, The Cleveland Review of Books, The Bennington Review, Eighteen-Century Fiction, Poetry Daily, Annulet, mercury firs, dollar bills, and an NFTA bus shelter have featured his writing. He has taught community-based poetry workshops for teachers, teens, and workers and currently supports a community education project on Palestine.
Albert Abonado is a poet and essayist based in Rochester, NY. He is the author of JAW (Sundress Publications 2020) and Field Guide for Accidents (Beacon 2024), a National Poetry Series selection. He holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. He has received fellowships for poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. Albert teaches at SUNY Oswego and Finger Lakes Community College, where he is the Managing Editor of the Bare Hill Review. He is the former Director of Adult Programs at Writers & Books. His work has appeared in numerous journals including Boston Review, Colorado Review, The Laurel Review, The Margins, Triquarterly, Waxwing, Zone 3, and others.
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