Perpetual Motion Roadshow #35 is on very shortly featuring expat femme wordsmith HADASSAH HILL from New York City, sorry-ass folk singer CORT BULLOCH from Calgary, and secret rap legend JESSE DANGEROUSLY from Halifax!

The Perpetual Motion Roadshow is an indie press touring circuit, an unholy combination of a vaudevillian variety show and a punk rock tour. Each month, three new lively indie performers pile in a car and do seven cities in eight days, doing shows with the bold guarantee: NO BORING READINGS OR YOUR MONEY BACK! Transnational, it loops the northeast May-October and makes runs down the west coast during November-April. Founded by No Media Kings, we've been making our own fun since 2003—running on pure volunteer power and dirty dirty gasoline. All shows are pay-what-you-can.

Hadassah M. Hill (aka. Axon Panter) is a New York/Toronto-based performance artist and writer. Her work has appeared in Geeks, Misfits and Outlaws (2004) and Without A Net (2003). She toured Ontario and Quebec in 2004/05 with the performance troupe Trash and Ready and has performed at Ladyfest, Cheap Queers, Hysteria, and Mayworks. Her recordings include Bombshell Lexicon (2005) and Bad Girls Belief System (2005). In August, she's heading to Femme 2006 in San Francisco. Hadassah's also a textile artist who works in reconstructing/recycling vintage clothing and embroidery, and is Associate Art Director with $pread Magazine. She loves anything on two wheels, and rhinestones. Check her site out here. 

Bret McCabe, of the Baltimore City Paper, recently featured Narrow House Recordings in a recent article entitled Wordsound: Narrow House Recordings Puts Poetry On Plastic. Both Justin Sirois and Jamie Gaughran-Perez have contributed to the Small Press Exchange in the past, and maintain profiles. Below is a short excerpt of the piece. You may read the complete feature at the Baltimore City Paper.

Jamie Gaughran-Perez is disappointed in the total absence of zombie-on-zombie poetry in his life. “I’ve gotten haikus from zombies, about zombies, about zombie pets, about zombie love relationships, killing zombies—but no love letter to zombies yet, though there’s still time,” he says as he mentally scrolls through the upward of 50 submissions he’s received for a June poetry contest he sponsored. “And no zombie-zombie action.”

“Really?” asks Justin Sirois. “I’m going to have to start writing.”

Sirois—a congenial 27-year-old with a close-cropped skull, black-rimmed glasses, and tattoos on the rebar arms of a bricklayer—is entering for the creative buzz, not to win the prize. He made the prize. A graphic designer at the Social Security Administration in Woodlawn by day—the main reason he chose his home in the verdant West Baltimore Gwynn Oak neighborhood, where he and Gaughran-Perez sit at the kitchen table—Sirois started his Narrow House Recordings poetry CD label in 2003, and passed Gaughran-Perez a copy of his most recent release, Buck Downs’ Pontiak Fever, to pass along.

Simplicity and hard work keeps audiences coming back.

Though the Yellow Door is known for its history, it is still a commonly frequented venue. Once a month, it hosts a poetry and prose reading where about forty people fill the basement, including Yellow Door veterans and McGill students. Spoken word artist Ian Ferrier, who performed at one of the shows, said that the Yellow Door has been kind to the literary scene. Poets attending the readings agree that the coffeehouse, the longest running in Canada, has played a vital part in Montreal. It is the first place in the city they became aware of that offered a regular venue for folk music and poetry.

Evenings are organized by poet Ilona Martonfi, and feature talented Montreal poets and prose writers such as Julie Keith, Sonja Skarstedt, George Slobodzian, Stephen Morrissey, Carolyn Zonailo, and many others.

This is the eight year that Martonfi has organized readings: Lovers and Others, an annual event about love, union and relationships, has also been held at Hurley’s Irish Pub and Café Sarajevo. She says, “I enjoy networking and community-building among poets, writers and people who love creative writing. Sometimes publishers from Toronto or Vancouver will contact me to book one of their writers.”