DISPATCH: Rachelle Toarmino’s Hell Yeah Release Party & Community Science Fair (BICA School, Buffalo)

“It takes a village to learn, make art, and publish a book. And I just love my village.”

All photos by Pat Cray

I had the perfect disguise: a crisp white lab coat and a wedding ring. I was attending Rachelle Toarmino’s Hell Yeah Release Party & Community Science Fair first as a scientist, presenting research on randomness and writing practices, and second as the poet’s husband, there to cut nametags, cart party supplies, and at 11pm remind Rachelle to maintain her 1,409-day Duolingo streak. When I volunteered to set up the Science Fair, selecting the arrangement of artists and writers, I knew Rachelle would never suspect that I was committing to memory the exact sequence of presenters and their projects (which I will discuss in detail later) or the precise dimensions of the BICA School interior (1,712 square feet). When I pointed my phone at Rachelle stepping into the spotlight, the other guests would see a proud husband like any other, never to guess that I meant to transmit the recording via secure VPN to my overseas editor for fact-checking. No one knew I played a third role that night: clandestine dispatcher for Zona Motel.

Rachelle and I arrived at BICA, the Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art, a little after 5pm and found our friend Matt Kenyon already standing in the parking lot with BICA’s Chango and wavy waiting to drop off a presentation from his wife Laura Marris, one of the night’s scientists. BICA holds down the southwest corner of the Essex Art Center, a former ice block cutting and storage warehouse on the West Side of Buffalo. It was strange to stand in that pockmarked lot making small talk in the humming hours before an event. Rachelle and I frequent BICA openings, but we hadn’t come here with our own tablecloths and party favors in hand since our wedding night, which had transpired on this same spot just 740 days before.

But we didn’t have time to reminisce. There was a Community Science Fair to set up. I helped for as long as Rachelle would allow me, checking in presenters and assisting with the setup of their trifolds, but eventually it became clear that my refrain of “What can I do?” was becoming a distraction. To linger much longer would be suspicious, and I couldn’t blow my cover this early in the night, so I walked around the corner to grab a beer at the Essex Street Pub with another scientist, Noah Falck.

A transplant from Dayton, Ohio, now Literary Director at the nonprofit Just Buffalo, Noah had known Rachelle since her days as a JB intern circa 2012, had seen both of us launch magazines in 2016, and had officiated our wedding in 2023. A moment like Rachelle’s book release was an occasion to look back, across the foam of a local IPA, and consider all that had changed.

Noah and Rachelle each had put out their last books in 2020, in what feels like an alternate timeline. With traditional venues unavailable, they found alternatives: Noah read from Exclusions on porches all across Buffalo and Rachelle launched That Ex with a drive-in at a fossil park. That Ex represented the culmination of a voice Rachelle had honed throughout the 2010s, which happened to coincide with the development of a different but related voice she used for different purposes: getting in and out of neighborhood Facebook fights alongside Mickey Harmon, firing off late night tweets that ended up on novelty mugs, and hard-launching alts like @pushpopofficiai on Twitter and @haironshowerwall and @heyitsedible on IG. Because of this, I felt (I explained to Noah as we considered a second beer, leaning into the Essex window and dodging pool cues) that some readers confused these two voices, collapsing them into a single eponymous speaker, “That Ex.” This was a speaker of chatty love poems, wry observations on contemporary life, utterances from “a heart’s-eye view of the world”. But the focus on a few banger poems and a few banger tweets tended to obscure other interests and influences developing just as steadily. Hell Yeah, I said, would surprise people who had formed their impressions of Rachelle in a time before Elon and AI slop, before her departure from Buffalo and her return.

“Hell yeah,” Noah said.

“Hell yeah,” I replied.

Then we noticed the sun lowering down Rhode Island Street and thought it best to get back to the science fair, lest any student attempt an experiment unsupervised.

In fact the first guest had been with us an hour already: the waning gibbous, which loomed in baby blue above the West Buffalo treeline like the one perennially early friend who won’t leave your kitchen when you’re still trying to thaw the shrimp. Only 225,591 miles from Earth, a Super Harvest Moon Aries had heralded the whole week of Hell Yeah, lingering through our mornings and illuminating our nightly walks, when Rachelle would share her hopes for the release party, how she wanted to diffuse the attention usually lavished on the author, and have everyone who attended play an active part in the evening, in making it happen. So when the day came, along with the usual poet merch (books, broadsides, t-shirts), Rachelle set out “HELL YEAH” knuckle tattoos, red Solo cups of pens and pencils, and most importantly, pocket-sized notebooks screenprinted (at the local LIBBY Projects + Editions) with lines from her poem “Heartbeast”:

It is a sound of neighboring

      this grand gut answer

      in which your fricative

and my fricative uprise

      into absolute      value

into same      music

What is the sound of neighboring? The grand gut answer? Hell Yeah, of course. Later in the night Rachelle reveals to the audience that an earlier draft of the poem had included those words, what would become her book’s title, but she eventually decided their ecstatic suggestion would be enough. The choice to remove them—while leaving the echo in the readers’ ears—repositions the speaker and the reader by bringing both inside the play-space of the poem. We supply the missing words. We answer. We can’t help it.

I remember when Rachelle started to write the poem. It was in Greenfield, Massachusetts, a chilly night in November. Our friend and Rachelle’s former housemate Jayson Keery was organizing an event called Ritual Grotto which would include readings, a film screening, and several somatic rituals. I still can recall the feeling of CAConrad’s sugarless chocolate in my mouth as I closed my eyes and waited for words to come. (They did, and years later ended up in a poem.)

Ritual Grotto spoke to some of Rachelle’s deepest and longest held interests in poetry. From the Peach Mag readings of the 2010s to Beauty School, which she launched after finishing her MFA in 2023, Rachelle has focused her energy on building collaborative spaces and communities of practice. I think this started simply as a desire to bring together people who could share, riff, provoke, and appreciate one another. But over the years, the ideas themselves—notions of reception, experiment, and response—became rooted more deeply in her own poetics.

So the block letters on the cover of the little black notebooks offered the key to the whole night: an invitation to participate in the “same music.” They came with instructions:

1. TAKE A JOURNAL AND PEN

2. VISIT EACH SCIENCE PROJECT

3. RESPOND TO THE SCIENTISTS’ CREATIVE PROMPTS

A visitor looking up from these instructions, pen and blank journal in hand, might have been intimidated. Around two long, broad tables were arranged thirteen writers and artists with trifold cardboard displays explaining their latest research into topics of universal interest. In my convincing guise of “guest” and “participant,” I worked my way through the Science Fair.

Jared Benjamin invited visitors to imagine witnessing a SUPERNOVA.

Diego Espíritu coded a webpage to demonstrate the warping of SPACETIME on two of Rachelle’s poems.

Gardner Astalos argued that everything is connected through ENTANGLEMENT.

Noah Falck brought the ELECTRICITY with a Lite-Bright and designs for a Tesla transformer.

Joshua Thermidor welcomed the process of ENTROPY within a selection of poems.

I invited participants to randomly select from a handful of hidden prompts to find language in RANDOMNESS—from the flight path of party balloons to the roll of dice to interactions with strangers.

Laura Marris shared heat maps of the MIGRATION patterns of birds and asked us to draw maps of our home from memory.

Dana Murray Tyrrell took inspiration from nearby Niagara Falls, inviting us to trace postcards of the wonder onto tissue paper, then spritz this with acetone to observe EROSION.

Joel Brenden invited pairs to compare their points of view in a stunning diorama on PARALLAX.

Sage Enderton asked us to write from the point of view of PLATE TECTONICS.

Talia Ryan tackled PHOTOSYNTHESIS with a station where guests could place crystals, film strips, and other objects onto cyanotype paper, transforming these with a UV lamp and water bath into afterimages.

Avye Alexandres, meditating on MAGNETIC NORTH, presented a slate-gray sheet of carbon paper and asked guests to write down the one thing they would take if they had to leave home in a hurry.

Sarah Jane Barry yeeted us into BLACK HOLES, asking us to imagine what happens at the end. And here the table turned back to Jared Benjamin and his supernovas.

I counted over a hundred guests complete the circuit, most of them moving slowly, leaning down into the projects, filling their notebooks. There were many old friends, like Matthew Bookin and Kristen Felicetti. We noted how unlucky it was that they just missed our mutual friend (and my secret Zona Motel editor) Lucy K. Shaw, who had spent the past few days with Rachelle and me in Buffalo. But most of the guests were strangers to me. All the better, I thought; this improved my chances of going undetected, as I could interview these strangers about their impressions of the night under the pretense of small talk or scientific inquiry. In fact, as the night turned that definite corner from gathering into party, I discovered that the lab coat granted me rare powers to eavesdrop, interrupt, and redirect. I began to stride around the BICA School like a tenured professor.

“You missed a project,” I said to an elderly gentleman walking toward the bathroom. I pointed him back toward Joel Brenden’s PARALLAX with the edge of my screenprinted gradebook. The stranger apologized and turned around.

Meanwhile, Rachelle never made it out of the front room, where she remained three-ways wedged between the bar, the merch table (where Peach Mag co-founder Bre Foster handled sales), and the glorious half-sheet HELL YEAH cake from Alexis Kerr and Fat Daddy’s, a recreation of the book’s cover in red velvet and glittery hand-lettering. While some of us chose to look the part of scientists, Rachelle was in patent leather platform boots, dark brown lace bell bottoms, almond acrylics in a sparkly nude, and an oversized black t-shirt bearing lines from her poem “Real Romantic” in her own paintbrushed handwriting: QUICK QUESTION WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME (and on the back) SHORT ANSWER YOU CAN HAVE IT. The white letters of “WANT” draped gracefully over a sixteen-week baby bump. As congratulations piled on congratulations, Rachelle let well wishers know that this week our daughter was beginning to hear. This would be her first poetry reading. (And her first Community Science Fair.)

When I was sure the fair couldn’t fit any more participants, Ana Vafai—the songwriter, singer, and multi-instrumentalist who performs as Little Cake—poked her head through a door at the back and boomeranged her voice across the room to announce that the next phase of the program would begin. I checked the time on my phone and saw an email from R.D. Pohl’s Substack—the first Hell Yeah review had hit. This meant that the black biker-jacketed geist of Buffalo poetry himself must be on his way.

The next phase of the party took place in a two-story warehouse space lined with workbenches, power tools, instruments, and sculptures. Rachelle and I hadn’t been here since our wedding night, when we used it for an afterparty featuring DJ “Simcard” Sam Turner, Rachelle’s friend from her undergrad days at UB. The space was unchanged, except the stage was flipped from the south side of the room to the north, positioning Little Cake’s keyboard on a bed of artificial turf alongside a seven-foot geode in the shape of an inverted uterus. Right on cue, Bob Pohl appeared at my shoulder.

Everyone in Buffalo knows that Little Cake’s performances are unmissable. She combines the richness of classical arrangements with the catchiness of the Great American Songbook, the unexpected delights of jazz improvisations, a voice made for Broadway, and the off-kilter showmanship of a cabaret favorite. More people outside Buffalo should know this, too. But the Hell Yeah Release Party & Community Science Fair performance was special even by Little Cake’s exalted standards. After navigating her voluminous tulle, she started with Little Cake hits like “Dear Old Pal” and “DJ Crybaby,” which she introduced with a story about the song’s origin in 2016 in an apartment that she shared with Rachelle and the eponymous disc jockey who loved the Smiths and never paid his rent. To my surprise, she moved into a selection of Connie Converse covers. Hearing Little Cake sing “Roving Woman” and “Talkin’ Like You (Two Tall Mountains),” I realized why my recent discovery of Connie Converse (thanks Howard Fishman) had felt so familiar: they sounded like Little Cake songs. Finally, Little Cake began a sequence of four new songs (written just this week) interpreting poems in Hell Yeah: “You Like That,” “Normal Neurotic,” “Freak Accident,” and “Killer.” This set raised the night into a new register. The arrangements were extraordinary. And as Rachelle later said, Little Cake “[heard] every hint and shift” in the poems.

The performance made three things clear: We need more Little Cake, we need a Little Cake Covers Connie Converse album, and we need a Little Cake Hell Yeah LP.

Rachelle embraced Ana and began her set with a note of gratitude. “It takes a village to learn, make art, and publish a book. And I just love my village.” She thanked everyone who had participated in the night, from the scientists to the cake bakers to the guests. “Aidan and I talk a lot about what makes Buffalo a special place. And I think what it comes down to, is Buffalo is a place where people say yes. And that’s what this book is about. It’s about saying yes to … whatever is in front of you, and responding.”

Rachelle said she would read in “basically” sequential order: “We begin in hell and we end somewhere very different.”

I’ve heard Rachelle read selections from this manuscript going back several years, the most recent being just two weeks ago in Syracuse at Liz Bowen’s and Tim Carter’s Seemingly Mature Reading Series. But I’ve never heard her open a set with the book’s first poem, “Hell and Back.” Nor had I ever heard Rachelle read it at a Community Science Fair. In this context, it became clear just how well the poem sets up the various interests and inheritances of the book, and how much it speaks to Rachelle’s broader preoccupations within language and art.

“Maybe I’m not a party,” it opens—ironically, because tonight Hell Yeah is such a party, clearly. And the poem lays out many of the book’s interests like stations at the science fair in the adjacent room.

      I approximate myself on all fours

      I am like this      reacting like this

      This is my      body take it

      Having made it so real

      I broke it for you

      I income thusly into contact

      with beautiful reasons

There’s the experience of approximation, from like to like to like. The language of the Eucharist, the Word made flesh made word: the broken body and the broken line. The way sound lets meaning slip and slosh around, overspilling the containers of words and their definitions.

      Come any closer

      I can’t keep myself to myself

      This music is touching

      and mine is a tongue

      and a tongue around nothing

            rings

There’s the interplay of the senses, the way sound can be a kind of touching, the tongue another limb for feeling around in the dark. There is (always in Rachelle’s poetry) the implied response and the patient waiting for it.

Rachelle read from each of the book’s three sections: MUSIC (a lyric bravura performance, all bangers, no skips), FLOWERS (where the narrowing of the lyric aperture draws careful attention to a series of language experiments, machines of thought part Mousetrap and part cootie catcher), and MEAT (which enacts various compressions: the collapsing of socially acceptable language; thought’s narrowing gyre around a nest of fixations; desire as the molten core of being). She closed, as promised, with the final poem in the book: “Rachelle Toarmino.” after Molly Brodak’s “Molly Brodak.” The luminous, short lyric retraces in miniature the whole journey of the book. I felt the poem’s volta—“No”—in my ligaments. At this point in the poem you realize you’ve been holding your breath; the “No” is like the first kick up from the bottom of the pool. Here we recognize the accomplishment in the commonplace, the book’s title, language we all share. Rachelle has pressganged Hell itself into her ecstatic, unconditional affirmation.

“I bet it felt like heaven.”

Rachelle read for only twelve minutes. After she finished, applause still strong around the room, Joshua Thermidor and I got a “Hell Yeah” chant started. Rachelle noticed and forced a transition into “Josh Allen—Josh Allen—Josh Allen.”

As a line formed for hugs, hellos, and book signing, many in the audience filtered back into the science fair, hoping to catch the experiments they missed during their first circuit. I paged through my own notebook to review the record of the night’s experiments. In a sea-green felt-tipped marker I had written “all the spaghetti turns to Angel Hair.” Opposite that was “tectonic plates: I’m the big one.” On another page: “Take two / lefts and a right / turn around into / your readymade / context // in this system energy / is never lost / only waits.” Then a ghost in cyanotype, acetone blur of the Falls.

It was the kind of party that no one wanted to leave. I caught Bob on his way out, letting him know how much I looked forward to reading his review later in the night. He said he had work in the morning and needed to get back home to Depew. But twenty minutes after our parting, I found Bob under the parking lot’s tall sodium lamps, deep in conversation with Joel Brenden. There were five or six clusters like this throughout the lot, all overflow from the Hell Yeah party.

But eventually we owed the BICA team their peace. We packed up half the science fair and left the rest to collect in the morning. As Rachelle and I turned onto Essex, a dozen guests still lingered in the lot behind us.

The event had ended, but I was still on the job. I had exclusive access to the afterparty—so exclusive, in fact, that the afterparty was just Rachelle and me in the drive-thru of the Delaware Avenue Mighty Taco, twelve minutes to close. We ordered two Super Mightys, two Banderitos, and a chicken quesadilla.

As after every event, Rachelle pressed me to recount everything I had seen and heard in exact detail, no paraphrasing. I groaned in mock exhaustion, but really I welcomed the opportunity. Unbeknownst to Rachelle, I faced a looming deadline. Our familiar ritual allowed me to begin mentally drafting this dispatch.

In the passenger’s seat, Rachelle tore into her unevenly heated, ultraprocessed Buf-Mex burrito.

“Alright,” I said. “The first guest was the waning gibbous.”

“No—no—no,” Rachelle said. “Get to the good stuff.”