It's fall and like any true book lover knows, it's time to cozy up with your favorite blanket and relax with a good book. Whether you're picking up the latest book of the season or a classic from the canon, we're here to show your the best places throughout the D.M.V. for scoring fresh reads—our fantastic indie book shops, of course!

Kramerbooks and Afterwords Café

DUPONT CIRCLE, WASHINGTON, DC

By Madeline Dell'Aria

Wedged in like the keystone of the Dupont Circle arch, Kramerbooks and Afterwords Café is an amalgamation of culinary and literary worlds. Restaurant, bar, and bookshop, Kramerbooks is not your standard independent bookstore. It has been a fixture of the community since 1976 and offers more than most other bookstores, with a large café peering out onto 19th St. NW that provides an impressive diversity of items and a full-service bar with literary-themed cocktails like “Catcher in the Rye.”

Bookshelves showcase the usual suspects: the bestsellers, the trending authors, and a whole lot more. The small store doesn’t offer used books, its new titles so densely packed into different sections that they seem almost to blend together. Proud of its local heritage, Kramerbooks devotes a large selection to the city that hosts it, which no doubt pleases history fans and tourists alike.

Wanderlust is not lost on the inhabitants of the bustling Dupont Circle and certainly not on Kramerbooks clientele. The Circle is surrounded by embassies from all over the world and gazing upon the brightly colored spines of travel books will have you pining for adventure, from a cheese tour of Vermont to the tropical beaches of Phuket. Like many independent bookstores, Kramerbooks also stays quite busy. Few event calendars can rival the raw frequency of Kramerbooks’ lineup, with an author reading, wine tasting, or music event nearly every night.

Because the bookstore is also café and bar, its hours range from early morning to the very early morning. In other words: it caters to early birds and night owls alike and is easily accessible via metro. Take a gander at the clientele and you’ll see architects scribbling down drawings, lobbyists making friends, and the [rare] government official perusing a government docket. For those seeking respite from the hurry of D.C., you won’t find it here. From the bustle to the price of beer, it's clear you're in the city.

Madeline Dell’Aria, a Northern Virginia native, is a graduate of George Mason University's BFA Creative Writing program. Growing up she wanted to become a tree, a witch, or an explorer; so she became a writer.

By Sean Pears

Photo Credit: Lieven Verbrugge, www.synapsedynamics.com

On December 7th Bridge Street Books hosted a reading for the release of Written (if p then q press 2014), the collected poems 1976-2013 of P. Inman. That the poet chooses to interrupt his own name with a period is mimetic of his poetics, which has been invested for decades in disrupting, erupting, and rupturing the normal flow of language. Consider these lines from his book ocker (1982): “cudb / ea,mlaw // (spill)theor) // blome // cullen,trenm,occlu (which each occur).” If you dismiss this type of poetry as concept-driven gibberish, you dismiss a major figure of what may be the only literary movement in recent history to put Washington, D.C. on the map: the avant-garde writers of the 1970s and 80s often uncomfortably elbowed into the category of Language Poetry. Inman is a poet about whom admirers and practitioners of Language Poetry get really excited; as Doug Lang put it in his introduction, “comparing Pete with the Language poets is like putting an astronaut in with cab drivers.”

Written, P. Inman (if p then q press 2014) — *Written*, P. Inman (if p then q press 2014)

Written is a 728-page tome representing 38 years of work. It seems right that neither of these numbers is round. In a range of fonts and sizes, lines move right-left, down-up, and diagonally across the pages of Written. Discussing Inman’s Platin (Eclipse 1979), Craig Dworkin in the book’s introduction calls these poems “among the most linguistically drastic writing to have emerged from a period of notoriously radical lexical experimentation.” Having had a scattered exposure to Language poetry in general (and none to Inman’s work specifically), hearing Inman read these poems was…interesting. I sat upstairs at Bridge Street and, as he read, Inman moved in and out of my visual field. Sometimes I saw his face, then just the top of his head, then nothing at all. This strikes me as a workable metaphor for my experience of the poems. Images, gestures, registers would surface; then suddenly I would catch myself distracted by the titles on the Recent Arrivals shelf opposite where I sat.

The most pleasurable moments for me—not that “pleasure” is the point of this poetry and anyone genuinely interested in what the point is should buy the book and read Dworkin’s fine introduction—were those that seemed to aspire to the condition of music. The title of “OC,” which opened the reading and Written, refers to free jazz innovator Ornette Coleman. “An ice think,” the poem opens, “prosed/ trying to figure out the touch of things/ the pour gets meshed/ only or little to music/ makes of pepper.” This poem excites me. The humor, the play, the indeterminacy, the slippage in and out of meaning, in and out of self-reference. Written is a gift, an idiosyncratic window into some of Language poetry’s most radical possibilities.

After the reading I drove up to The Dougout, a venue in the basement of a small rented single-family home in Northeast D.C., for another release: Foulbrood, the new album from D.C. band Two Inch Astronaut. The band represents the legacy of a D.C. avant-garde movement contemporary to Inman: the postpunk scene of the 80s and 90s (look up videos of early Fugazi shows and you’ll get the idea). The show was everything that the reading was not—brazen, youthful, unapologetic, loud, emotional—though of course it missed some things that Inman offered too. As I stood sweating in the small wood-paneled basement packed with millennials re-living a movement we were all too young to have actually lived through the first time, it occurred me to that it is very clear where the D.C. avant-garde art movement has been. Where is it going?