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Jay Besemer and Joe Hall
Featured Book
On Being Half-Imaginary
About On Being Half-Imaginary: An experimental, hybrid exploration of personal archives, memory, identity and time (travel), On Being Half-Imaginary mixes memoir with media studies to present a nonlinear tale of becoming oneself. With lines blurring between fictional and real, between past and future, between self and others, this book suggests that identity is as much about change and relationships as it is about self-definition and experience. Candid, sensitive, emotional and bold, the author presents a multidimensional life, lived uniquely and intimately--always in motion, always different.
This book will be available for purchase at the event.
About This Event
Jay Besemer and Joe Hall
Thursday June 18th, 2026 @ 7:00PM - 8:00PM
Join us as we welcome Jay Besemer and Joe Hall to the store for a reading from their books On Being Half-Imaginary and Buffalo Free Rapid Transit.
Featured Author
Jay Besemer
Poet and artist Jay Besemer is the author of many books, most recently On Being Half-Imaginary and The Horse (Overneath Books 2026 and 2025 respectively). He lives, works and wanders in Chicago.
In Conversation With
Joe Hall
Joe Hall’s seven books of poetry include Fugue & Strike and Someone’s Utopia. Current Affairs on Fugue & Strike: “a remarkable poetic project, unlike anything else in literature today.” The Boston Globe: “Joe Hall’s poems move between a fist-pounding urgency, the fire and squelch of this moment of our endtime, and a vulnerability hushed and gentle as a nightgown on a laundry line.” Based in Buffalo, Hall has performed and delivered talks nationally at bars, squats, universities, and rivers. Protean Magazine, the Cleveland Review of Books, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Poetry Daily, Fence Digital, Mercury Firs, Annulet, dollar bills, and an NFTA bus shelter have all featured his writing. Community Mausoleum featured his essay “PEN America: Cultural Imperialism’s Avant-Garde.” Find more at http://joehalljoehall.com.
About the Venue
Pilsen Community Books
Pilsen Community Books is a worker owned and operated independent bookstore that specializes in new and used literary fiction, radical history and politics, and literature in translation. The staff's goal is to unite their bookselling experience with their belief that labor is entitled to all it produces.
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