Thursday November 16 * 7pm

Join us for the release party of Tea Leaves by Jacob Budenz. With additional readings by Craig L. Gidney, Dave Ring, K.M. Szpara, Marianne Kirby, and Dominique Dickey.

A queer romance spans multiple reincarnations, but only in doomed cities. A gay medieval scholar must testify for his life to the sentient octopus who has him trapped in a French Quarter cafe bathroom. A lesbian food truck power couple caters a gay wedding in Lafayette as the spirits of the air and land attempt to sabotage their own ill-fated union. Heralded by Baynard Woods (author of Inheritance: an Autobiography of Whiteness) as "fabulous, in every sense... quick and sharp, full of charms that whisk us into the darkest forests of the human condition," Tea Leaves explores the urgency of contemporary queer life in encounters with the otherworldly. Editor-in-chief of the iconic Taco Bell Quarterly, M.M. Carrigan, calls the collection "beautiful... It's funny, it's queer, and it's full of life," and Tad Bartlett, managing editor at Peauxdunque Review, writes, "Jacob tells tales of longing--longing to be seen; longing to be loved; longing for definition, for certainty, or at least to be accepted in all our foible-filled uncertainties. These are unremittingly and exultantly queer stories, but this is not a collection solely for the queer reader. These are stories of intense universality. Jacob Budenz is a magician. Give yourself over to his spell....