Inside A Poetry Book Launch Party In An Underground Boxing Gym

Seeing Matt Starr at the launch of his first book, Mouthful, one thing is for sure: he’s not like any other writer I know. Most writers’ book parties are quiet affairs full of tweedy personas in an old bookstore. Starr’s party was in—like many of the events he’s hosted for his imprint Dream Baby Press—an odd location: a subterranean boxing gym. There was no card table folded out with stacks of books to sign. Instead, things kicked off with a marching band performance. The ring was equal parts theater-in-the-round and alter for Starr’s unique style of literary fervor. From the moment he stepped into the spotlight in his black t-shirt, black jeans, and black boots, the crowd of 400 downtown, subculture Cool Kids™ was transfixed. 

Starr’s erotic, comical poems are racy, unabashed, and deeply, deeply human. He pushes the emotions around adolescent love, sex, and shame to their furthest points, describing feelings everyone can remember from their respective youth, but dare not speak of. They describe everything from teenage love to Paddington Bear to shoplifting from CVS. (The latter was featured in The New Yorker.) For many, if not most, we let these cringing memories fade with time. Starr’s work calls them back, and punctuates them with laughter, assured by the hindsight of age that we’ve all been there. And it’s all done through a bright smile. Matt Starr is basically a modern Leonard Cohen, if he was a pleasure to have in class. He’s a happy-go-lucky Lou Reed, raised in the suburbs with good parents. All of the ins and outs of growing up and discovering one’s self informs Starr’s poetry. 

“A lot of the poems were about me learning how to acknowledge so many of these feelings, and writing about these situations,” he says. “I feel like I was chipping away at a rock, like carving out my David. I’d do touch ups for a long time, just working on the penis a little more.”

To that end, the humor in Starr’s work isn’t just for comedic effect, it also acts as a salve to tell people it’s alright to remember these things and to go back to those days. “I want my writing to be accessible,” Starr says. “It’s not explicitly ‘comedy.’ Annie Hall is a comedy, but it’s not. The humor is what gets to through it. It softens the edges.”

The event saw some 400 people fill the gym to watch the performances, a mix of readings from Starr himself, fellow writers and artistic performers, GIRLS’s Jemima Kirk, people from Starr’s past, present, and future, and a Drake impersonator. Starr performed too, reading a selection of poems from the book, but that’s not the first place anyone attending would see him. During any of Starr’s and Dream Baby Press’s events, which he produces with his business partner Zach Roif, he can be seen bounding around the room checking sound levels, prepping the next performer, making sure the supply of Van Leeuwen ice cream or coolers of Recess drinks were still stocked, and going over his own remarks. If that sounds like a lot, it absolutely is. But judging from the look on his face, there’s no place he’d rather be. 

“I so revere the punk spirit of doing it yourself. I wanted to be a part of that tradition,” says Starr. “Only I knew how to make this book the way I wanted it.” The imprint’s planning to continue publishing other young, energized writers in this space, and has a new kind of literary scene galvanized around them. Mouthful represents the tenor of these books: youthful, funny, and genuine. According to Starr, “I want it to be fun to read, because it was really fun to write.”

[Photos by Cobrasnake]