After fourteen years, Berl’s Brooklyn Poetry Shop has closed its doors in Brooklyn as New York’s poetry bookstore.

We began as a dream: a platform for poetry in all its forms, alive in the shared passion for expression, friendship, and communities of readers and writers.  It was a family project from the start, and it grew into something greater: a love letter to New York’s diverse voices and a quirky home for a global poetry community. We are incredibly proud of what we built, and deeply grateful to all who helped bring it to life, from its days as a scrappy pop-up with chapbooks under felted rocks at a table at the Brooklyn Flea to our two joyful incarnations in storefronts on Front Street in DUMBO as a street-front bookstore.

Over the years, Berl’s tracked the arc of our lives, through the birth of our children, through more than a decade of sharing and growing, over hundreds of unforgettable events. The space itself still echoes with the voices of those who shared their work, those who came to listen, and those who helped make it all happen: curators, collaborators, interns, volunteers, publishers and editors, bookmakers, writers, artists, performers, visitors, friends, landlords, neighbors, readers, poets.

From readings to book launch parties to lecture series, from workshops to performances of all imaginable varieties, you helped us create a living, breathing poetry shop: a rare entity, a dream made real here under the rumble of the trains, in a city of poets. Thank you especially to the writers and readers, doing the brave, quiet work of shaping language to confound, surprise, challenge, delight and most importantly to connect. You made Berl’s a space where poetry without borders and boundaries could be embodied, welcomed and felt.

Our Brooklyn storefront is shuttering permanently this month but our website will continue to host the rich archive of poetry recordings and memories over many years.

The books are making their way to Rhode Island, where our family now lives. For now, they’ll be shelved in an office library at the historic Lafayette Mill in North Kingstown, just off Narragansett Bay, near the village of Wickford, with woods and waterfalls by the parking lot.

It’s not a public shop at this point, but once it is set up, Jared will be happy to welcome visitors to this South County Poetry Reading Room — reach out anytime at southcountypoetryroom@gmail.com.

This new chapter is still taking shape, with hopes it may grow as a space for poetry gatherings, book clubs, and informal, collaborative workshops that invite conversation and shared discovery.

Thank you, again, for your presence, your support, your words. Poetry lives in people!

Love and gratitude! -Jared and Farrah

For 14 years the only all poetry bookstore in NYC, specializing in indie press chapbooks and books. 

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LIVE AT BERL'S:

Formerly:  

141 Front Street in D.U.M.B.O, Brooklyn

Phone :  

347-687-2375

Email : 

berlspoetry@gmail.com

Recording of the month :