Martin Rock

Rachel Richardson and Martin Rock

26 JANUARY 2017 — thursday

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Rachel Richardson, Hundred-Year Wave, and Martin Rock, Residuum, request ASL interpreters one week in advance at editor@poetryflash.org, wheelchair accessible, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com)


MORE ABOUT THE READERS
Rachel Richardson's new book of poems is Hundred-Year Wave. Her first collection was Copperhead. Victoria Chang says, "Hundred-Year Wave is a gorgeous book that borrows its vast subject matter from new parenthood, marriage, the ocean, whales, and Sylvia Plath.…Her gifts are wide and deep like the ocean, as she shows us that 'we are not lost/ in the vast expanse of lostness.'" A former Stegner fellow at Stanford and a recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, she is a contributing editor at Memorious, coordinates poetry programming for the Bay Area Book Festival and co-directs Left Margin Lit, a new literary arts center in Berkeley.
Martin Rock's collection Residuum was chosen for the Cleveland State Poetry Center's 2015 First Book Award. Erin Belieu says, "Martin Rock's remarkable debut collection, Residuum, takes on nothing less than making the unsayable (as Heidegger perceives it) 'legible.' I find the partial erasure form of this book dynamic, and lyrically fluid. Residuum is also genuinely moving and funny in spots." He's also the author of the chapbook Dear Mark, a response to the work of Mark Rothko; and with Kevin Prufer and Martha Collins he edited the Unsung Masters volume Catherine Breese Davis: On the Life and Work of an American Master. A translator from the Japanese widely published in literary journals, he has held senior editorial positions at several journals and is Founding Editor of Loaded Bicycle, an online journal of poetry, art, and translation. Poet-in-Residence at Texas Children's Hospital, he helps young patients express themselves through writing.