I have a complicated relationship with the word “slam.” Every time I hear the word qualifying some literary event — a poetry reading or a storytelling event — I feel my stomach lurch, as though I caught a whiff of some food that once gave me torrential runs. Not that I only have bad experiences with slams, not at all. But for every poem I’ve heard that revelled in the snap of a word as it rolled off the tongue, for every story I listened to that sparked against the speaker’s animated telling, there were five, ten, fifteen others that made me cringe back into my seat.