It's June! Allow us to tune you in to some of the coolest shows and events happening around town this month featuring our Lady Brain members! 

​Every Sunday - Mary Bee's Finding Harmony
This travel docu-series follows singer and host Mary Bee on the adventure of a lifetime across Europe as she makes friends with and sings with artists in different countries. The series focuses on the love of music and friendships grown during collaboration. More info

Saturday, June 1 - Art Around Adams
Many of our members will be performing as a part of this two mile art and music walk throughout the communities of Normal Heights and Kensington. The free festival is scheduled from 12-8pm, with performances happening at various venues and stages. More info

​Saturday, June 8 - Steph Johnson and Voices of Our City Choir at Laurel House Concert Series
Join Steph Johnson, Voices of Our City Choir, and special guest Eve Selis from 7-10pm at this private concert series in Oceanside. $25 Tickets. More info

Thursday, June 20 - Lady Brain Presents at Fair Trade Decor
Our next community gathering is going to be one for the books! Karina Frost has curated an awesome lineup (Ren Daversa and The Wicked Cool, Calamity, Trish Naval, and The Banduvloons) for your listening pleasure. She has also dedicated 15% of the proceeds from the door to Madre Assunta shelter in Tijuana. The venue is a really cool boutique in Coronado that is keeping its doors open after hours to welcome us into their space. Your attendance supports local business, local artists, and most importantly, our sisters in need. More info

Find more info about these and other member happenings over at our Calendar page!

Thanks to all who came out to support last night's community gathering in Barrio Logan at La Galeria Michel featuring Corina Rose Collective, The Slow Kill, Gaby Aparicio, Becca Jay Band, and The Banduvloons. Special thanks to Corina for organizing the showcase and to all our volunteers/supporters for helping out!  If you want to learn more about our monthly gatherings, make sure to sign up for our mailing list! Make sure to mark your calendars for 6/20 at Fair Trade Decor in Coronado, as well as our first annual Lady Brain Fest on 7/7 at Heritage Ranch in Encinitas!

Good poetry doesn’t require that the reader understand the mechanics involved behind the careful creation of each stanza. Good poetry will trap you within the confines of a moment you never lived, but that comes alive inside you so much so that you can see, feel, smell and even taste it. It will teleport you to another time and place, where the painful anguish, joy, frustration, and ecstasy lifts off the page and becomes your momentary reality, each thoughtfully chosen word a vital breath, a palpable heartbeat. Lizzie Wann’s new collection of
poetry entitled The Hospice Bubble & Other Devastating Affirmations is a perfect example of this. The only difference is that Wann is not merely a “good” poet, she is an exceptional one.
 
Wann’s book is divided into five segments: The Hospice Bubble, Death, Depression, Writing and Love.

In The Hospice Bubble collection of poems, the reader is guided through a painful journey of the looming loss of a beloved father and the heartache and numbness hurricane that violently/gently swirls you toward the impending doom that awaits. We are flashbacked to the delicate memories of a little girl riding passenger side in her father’s 18-wheeler while Willie Nelson croons through the radio, “chocolate chip waffles for breakfast a noon on Sundays,” and the belly dipping excitement of being tossed in the air by strong endearing arms before the burden of sickness settled in to weaken the body. In tandem with the sadness, these joyful memories make the impending loss even more unbearable. Wann careens us through hospital bedsides, mortuaries, hospice care, the “lift team” and the unavoidable decline with blunt grace. ​

Tender moments of acceptance arise, such as in “Bequeathments,” where a father, perceptive to a tapered timeline, gathers his daughters to bequeath them his most treasured possessions. This moment, so precisely relatable to anyone who has lost a beloved in a similar long sick way, is mournfully sweet: 

one afternoon, as winter sunlight waned
Dad asked me to bring a box from his room
small tv tray in front of him
he slowly began relieving the box of its contents
rings, dog tags, a smaller box with papers
a couple bibles, ID cards
 
In the Depression segment, the pro-longed discontentment that settles like concrete spreading heavy gloom throughout the body manifests through pensive prose that ruminates like an empty echo through the soul. One example of this is the poem “Bone Song,” which quakes with deep, resonating pain:
 
there is an ache
somewhere near
bottom of my throat
base of the neck
that is a sad song
played outdoors
near water
 
there is a tremble
in my chest

that is the difference
between love
& lover
 
In Love, the reader is taken on roller coaster dips of longing, finding/loving, and the sting of unrequited affections.  “Sins and Miracles” spirals into the chaotically intoxicating grip of Las Vegas, while at the same time touching upon the lack of something expected that never came to be, the coming together of hearts and bodies:
 
I am wearing Las Vegas home
white cotton steeped in beer,
sweat, residue of bed sheets,
memories of cigarettes whose
ghostly smoke still found ways
into these fibers
that now surround
my own sins and miracles
 
it was in Las Vegas
where we finally did not touch,
exchanged no compliments,
did not accept our anger
or loneliness
 
Above is merely a small sampling of Lizzie Wann’s recent poetic masterpiece. Once you pull back the cover and delve gently into the first poem, you will find it difficult to lay to rest. It entangles you in a web of melancholy beauty warbled through elegiac rhythms and beats, dips and highs, loss and reckoning. It will consume you for a spell, and while captive within these poetic trammels, relish every moment of the high-voltage life it pumps through your veins. Although, as the title suggests, devastating pangs lay in wait throughout her prose, the true,
unrefined beauty of Lizzie Wann’s poetry is anodyne to the human soul.

Find The Hospice Bubble & Other Devastating Affirmations:
Puna Press