Wed. Jan. 20

Memoir Part Deux for Nick Flynn (in photo)? Sorta. The Scituate-born writer and poet, is in town Wednesday at Berklee's Cafe 939 doing a reading/music combo. The reading comes from Flynn's followup to "Another Bullshit Night in Suck City," "The Ticking Is the Bomb." At 7, his musical guests are Eric Martin (recently a Neats guy all over again) and Drew O'Doherty. At 9:30, Buffalo Tom's Bill Janovitz and Chris Colbourn (along with Franc Graham) join up. Them's good company. And ticket for each? Just $5.

About "The Bomb": In 2007, during the months before Flynn’s daughter’s birth, his growing outrage and obsession with torture, exacerbated by the Abu Ghraib photographs, led him to Istanbul to meet some of the Iraqi men depicted in those photos. Haunted by a history of addiction, a relationship with his unsteady father, and a longing to connect with his mother who committed suicide, Flynn artfully interweaves in "The Ticking is the Bomb" passages from his childhood, his relationships with women, and his growing obsession—a questioning of terror, torture, and the political crimes we can neither see nor understand in post-9/11 American life. The time bomb of the title becomes an unlikely metaphor and vehicle for exploring the fears and joys of becoming a father. Here is a memoir of profound self-discovery—of being lost and found, of painful family memories and losses, of the need to run from love, and of the ability to embrace it again.

939 Boylston St., 617-923-8487 www.berklee.edu/events.