John Shoptaw

John Shoptaw and Daniel Wolff

26 APRIL 2015 — sunday

Poetry Flash presents a reading by John Shoptaw and Daniel Wolff, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org, wheelchair accessible, Diesel, A Bookstore, 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, 3:00 (510/653-9965, dieselbookstore.com)

MORE ABOUT THE READERS
John Shoptaw's debut book of poems, Times Beach, is the winner of the Notre Dame Review Book Prize. Robert Hass says, "Times Beach is, like most interesting American books, an original. It's about a place, the watershed of the Mississippi River, and it is an ecopoetics…It comes from a deep sense of the rhythms and dialect of a place and from a deeply literary and inventive imagination." He is also the author of a critical book On the Outside Looking Out: The Poetry of John Ashbery.
Daniel Wolff's new book of poems is The Names of Birds. Lucia Perillo says, "The poems in The Names of Birds aren't really about birds. Instead each individual species is a filter through which the human is seen, so that observation and introspection become overlaid and compounded acts. These poems show us the more accurately we can look outward, the more deeply we can see within our human selves." He has published numerous nonfiction books, including a national bestseller that won the Ralph J. Gleason Award for the best music book in 1985. He was nominated for a Grammy in 2003, and he's collaborated on documentary films, pop songs, and performance pieces.