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2011 Poetry Flash Reading Series


Poetry Flash readings take place at Moe's Books, Berkeley, and at Diesel, A Bookstore, Oakland.

To find out more about the Poetry Flash Reading Series, please email editor@poetryflash.org or call (510) 525-5476, weekday afternoons. ASL interpreters for the deaf and hearing impaired may be provided for these events with at least one week's notice. To request, email mbb@poetryflash.org, or editor@poetryflash.org. Our reading series venues are wheelchair accessible. Read more about the series on the Poetry Flash Reading Series page.


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20 JANUARY 2011 — thursday

Megan Harlan and Mari L'Esperance

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Megan Harlan, Mapmaking, and Mari L'Esperance, The Darkened Temple, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com; wheelchair accessible, ASL interpreters for the deaf and hearing impaired may be requested a week in advance by email, editor@poetryflash.org)

Megan Harlan's first book of poems, Mapmaking, is the winner of the John Ciardi Prize for poetry, selected by Sidney Wade. Alice Fulton says of it. "Megan Harlan's nuanced, visionary poems explore farsickness, the sensation of missing places we've never been, including the imaginary realms of lotusland and limbo…A profound meditation on the permeability of past and present, nature and artifice, self and other, space and time, Mapmaking is a miracle of invention." It's interesting, in this context, that Harlan had lived in seventeen different homes on four different continents by the time she graduated from high school. Her poetry has been published in American Poetry Review and elsewhere, and her fiction, travel writing and book reviews have been published in the San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Times, and elsewhere.

Mari L'Esperance is a Hapa poet, born in Kobe, Japan. Her first full-length book of poems, The Darkened Temple, won the 2007 Prairie Schooner Book Prize; Jane Mead says of it, "Mari L'Esperance enacts the process of defining a self out of fragments of cultural and personal history…by turns narrative, chantlike, fractured, and lyric, these tender, terrifying, and frank poems fight their way into song." An earlier collection, Begin Here, was the winner of the Sarasota Poetry Theatre Press Chapbook Prize. Her poems and prose have appeared in Connotation Press: An Online Artifact, Poetry Kanto, and Prairie Schooner. A recipient of fellowships and grants from the New York Times Company Foundation, Hedgebrook, and Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, Mari L'Esperance lives in the Bay Area.


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27 JANUARY 2011 — thursday

Judy Grahn with Anne Carol and Katherine Hastings

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Judy Grahn, love belongs to those who do the feeling, with musician Anne Carol, and Katherine Hastings, Updraft, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com; wheelchair accessible, ASL interpreters for the deaf and hearing impaired may be requested a week in advance by email, editor@poetryflash.org)

Judy Grahn's most recent books are the new and selected poems love belongs to those who do the feeling, 2008, and The Judy Grahn Reader, 2009. Judy Grahn is one of the towering pioneers in both feminist and gay and lesbian literature. The publication of her The Common Woman Poems in 1972 was a countercultural lightning bolt, followed through the 1970s and '80s and beyond by her myth-based poetry and her books of social theory. Her honors include an American Book Award for Queen of Wands and a Bill Whitehead Lifetime Achievement Award from The Publishing Triangle. She will be performing with singer, songwriter, and musician Anne Carol. Their new CD is Lunarchy.

Katherine Hasting's new book of poems is Updraft. F. D. Reeve says of her work, "Her affection for the living and her compassion for the dead vividly depict the world as it is while allowing her to project the freedom of transforming love. The language shimmers, the endings shine, the book announces a brilliant talent." She is the host of WordTemple on Santa Rosa's NPR affiliate KRCB FM and founder of the WordTemple Poetry Series in Sonoma County. Her poetry has been widely published in literary journals and anthologies.


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30 JANUARY 2011 — sunday

Risa Kaparo

Poetry Flash presents a solo reading/performance by poet and dancerRisa Kaparo, Diesel, A Bookstore, 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, 3:00 (510/653-9965, dieselbookstore.com; wheelchair accessible, ASL interpreters for the deaf and hearing impaired may be requested a week in advance by email, editor@poetryflash.org)

Risa Kaparo, poet, dancer, and the grand prizewinner of the prestigious John Lennon Songwriting Contest will read and perform her poetry from Awaken, her debut poetry and music CD. "There is power in Risa Kaparo's sensual voice, an allure, a beckoning. The voice plays like reflection, like flame on the varied musical deeps laid down by a brilliant ensemble of musicians. "Everyone I touch is god / play us as one instrument / I have yet little experience being all I am / Reveal me to myself." Awaken, her debut CD, calls us to this larger whole, this shimmer and oscillation where bodies and souls become one." —Poetry Flash. She is also the author of Embrace, a book of poetry. As Dr. Risa Kaparo, she created Somatic Learning, a methodology of wellness integrating psychology, neurology, biology, and meditative disciplines.


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10 FEBRUARY 2011 — thursday

Linda Lancione, Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, John Oliver Simon and Elaine Starkman

Poetry Flash presents Linda Lancione, Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, John Oliver Simon and Elaine Starkman, reading in celebration of the anthology Child of My Child: Poems and Stories for Grandparents, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com; wheelchair accessible, ASL interpreters for the deaf and hearing impaired may be requested a week in advance by email, editor@poetryflash.org)

Naomi Ruth Lowinsky is a Jungian analyst and a poet. Her two newest books of poems are Adagio & Lamentation and The Sister From Below: When the Muse Gets in Her Way. She is poetry and fiction editor of Psychological Perspectives and has published many essays and a prose book in her field.

Linda Lancione is widely published in literary journals, including Crazy Horse, Atlanta Review, and Poet Lore. Her latest chapbook is 2% Organic, 32 Short Poems from a West Marin Dairy Barn.

John Oliver Simon is a poet and translator. His most recent book of poems is Caminante; previous collections include Neither of Us Can Break the Other's Hold and Rattlesnake Grass. In 2001 he was awarded a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in Translation for his translation of the Chilean poet Gonzalo Rojas.

Elaine Starkman is both a poet and a prose writer. She's been published in Bellowing Ark, Calyx, Caesura, and many other journals. Along with five other Bay Area writers she published My Dreaming Waking Life: Sixty-Six Poems, Six Poets.


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20 FEBRUARY 2011 — sunday

Peter O'Leary and Brian Teare

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Peter O'Leary, Depth Theology, and Brian Teare, Pleasure, Diesel, A Bookstore, 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, 3:00 (510/653-9965, dieselbookstore.com; wheelchair accessible, ASL interpreters for the deaf and hearing impaired may be requested a week in advance by email, editor@poetryflash.org)

Peter O'Leary's most recent book of poems, his second, is Depth Theology, about which Andrew Joron opines, "Drawing poetic energy from the black deposits of the Text, O'Leary advances the gnostic effort of (re)constructing a hidden God. I know this book will be placed between the works of Baudelaire and Scholem in the universal library." O'Leary's first book of poems is Watchfulness; he has also published the critical book Gnostic Contagion: Robert Duncan & The Poetry of Illness, and, acting as his literary executor, he has edited two collections of the late poet Ronald Johnson.

Brian Teare's new book of poems is Pleasure. Fanny Howe says of it, "The painful rip of the body away from from a state of erotic joy to one of stunned aloneness is here explored in a garden in which the poet is tempted by the gnostic vision of reality, because it is so cruelly true to his experience." His two previous books of poems are The Room Where I Was Born and Sight Map. He is also editor and publisher of Albion Press, which he calls a "micro-press," that has published, among other works, a chapbook of Peter O'Leary's. Among his honors are a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, and fellowships from the NEA and the Ruth Lilly Foundation.


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24 FEBRUARY 2011 — thursday

Barbara Henning, Andrew Joron and Steve Katz

Poetry Flash presents Barbara Henning, Cities and Memory, Andrew Joron, Trance Archive, and Steve Katz, Time's Wallet, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com; wheelchair accessible, ASL interpreters for the deaf and hearing impaired may be requested a week in advance by email, editor@poetryflash.org)

Barbara Henning is both a poet and a novelist. Her new book of poems is Cities and Memory about which Erica Hunt says, "Barbara Henning is a practitioner of the long view…her knowing is voracious and nuanced and delicately aware…She writes the weather and the tides and she writes in what some say is an unnatural craft and she makes it seem natural." She has published four other books of poems, several chapbooks, and three novels, the newest of which is Thirty Miles to Rosebud a "story of bohemian life…in the '70s and '80s."

Andrew Joron's new book of poems is Trance Archive: New and Selected Poems; "Joron, far more…than any…of his contemporaries, is a magician, an alchemist of words…Reading his work is like entering a hall of mirrors," John Olson, Tillalala Chronicles. Among his recent books of poems are The Sound Mirror and The Cry at Zero. Born in Stuttgart, Germany, raised in the U.S., he is the translator of Literary Essays by the German Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch. Among his honors are three Rhysling Awards and two Gertrude Stein Awards.

Steve Katz is a novelist and a poet. His new book, Time's Wallet, is a memoir written in discrete sections he calls 'memoirrhoids', occurring in the spontaneous patterns of memory and cohering as a work of art. He has published many novels, some with big, commercial houses in New York and some as a pioneer member of Fiction Collective. Along a complex way, wending across the country and to Italy, working for the forest service, in a mercury mine, and as a bartender, he co-write a film called Grassland and published, along with much prose, several books of poetry.


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10 MARCH 2011 — thursday

Lynn Emanuel and Paul Hoover

Poetry Flash presents Lynn Emanuel, Noose and Hook, and Paul Hoover, Sonnet 56, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com; wheelchair accessible, ASL interpreters for the deaf and hearing impaired may be requested a week in advance by email, editor@poetryflash.org)

Lynn Emanuel's new book of poems is Noose and Hook. David St. John says, "I have long believed that Lynn Emanuel is one of the most innovative and subversive poets now writing in America…The brilliant, shattering, and disturbing poems of Noose and Hook are…compelling signposts to what yet might be possible in our future." The author of three previous books of poems, including her seminal Then Suddenly—, she has been included in the Pushcart Prize anthology, Best American Poetry, and The Oxford Book of American Poetry.

Paul Hoover's new book of poems is Sonnet 56, which consists of fifty-six variations on Shakespeare's fifty-sixth sonnet. He has published many books of poems, the two most recent being Edge and Fold and Poems in Spanish. His book of essays, Fables of Representation, was published in 2004. He is the editor of the Norton anthology Postmodern American Poetry, and with his wife Maxine Chernoff he edits the literary journal New American Writing.


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17 MARCH 2011 — thursday

Robert Fernandez, Ish Klein and Joshua Edwards

Poetry Flash presents a reading in celebration of Canarium Books with Robert Fernandez, Ish Klein and Joshua Edwards, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com; wheelchair accessible, ASL interpreters for the deaf and hearing impaired may be requested a week in advance by email, editor@poetryflash.org)

This is a reading in celebration of Canarium Books, which has published the first two poets and whose director and co-editor is the third.

Robert Fernandez's first book of poems is We Are Pharoah; Ange Mlinko says, "We Are Pharoah is a luscious saturnalia of language, adapting New York School painterliness to an erotic tropical sensibility." He is the recipient of fellowships from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the University of Iowa Department of English.

Ish Klein is both a filmmaker and a poet. Her new book of poems is Moving Day. Colorado Review says, "It's as if Walt Whitman fathered a child with Florence Nightingale and that child were standing on a rooftop in Brooklyn and sounding her benevolent yelp." As a filmmaker she received a 2005 NEA Digital Filmmaker Residency.

Joshua Edwards's first book of poems is Campeche, which also showcases the photographs of Van Edwards: "The poems and photographs in Campeche slowly circle the elements, animals, and voices of a world slipping out of reach. Titled after pirate Jean Lafitte's name for Galveston Island, the book is also a meditation on two islands (one real, one imaginary) that overlap in the minds of the poet and the photographer…" Joshua Edwards is the director and co-editor of Canarium Books. Currently a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, he is also a translator, having published Ficticia, a book-length poem by the Mexican poet Maria Baranda.


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20 MARCH 2011 — sunday

Dan Bellm, Tiffany Higgins and Fred Marchant

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Dan Bellm, Practice, Tiffany Higgins, and Aeneas stares into her helmet, and Fred Marchant, The Looking House: Poems, Diesel, A Bookstore, 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, 3:00 (510/653-9965, dieselbookstore.com; wheelchair accessible, ASL interpreters for the deaf and hearing impaired may be requested a week in advance by email, editor@poetryflash.org)

Dan Bellm's latest book of poems, his third, is Practice. Alicia Ostriker says, "Reading Dan Bellm's poems, I think of Auden saying, 'In the deserts of the heart / Let the healing fountain start.' I am in awe of how Dan Bellm's poems perform a dance with and against Holy Scripture." His first collection was One Hand on the Wheel, the first volume of Heyday's California Poetry Series. His second collection, Buried Treasure, won the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Prize and the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay DiCastagnola Award.

Tiffany Higgins's first book of poems, and Aeneas stares into her helmet, won the 2008 Carolina Wren Press Poetry Contest; Patrick Herron says of it, "Tiffany Higgins' anachronistic and recast hero is one brilliantly charged nexus of exploitation and war; she is captured, tortured, and released as a sequence of heartbreaking lyrics." She is also a translator and a critic.

Fred Marchant's newest book is The Looking House: Poems; The Journal says, "To my mind, what distinguishes Marchant's work is his willingness to take a hard look at human suffering while maintaining his unflinching, delicate tone." Marchant, who served during the Vietnam War, was one of the first marine officers ever to be honorably discharged as a conscientious objector. He has published many books of poems, including Full Moon Boat, and he is the editor of Another World Instead: The Early Poems of William Stafford, 1937–1947, which includes Stafford's poems as a conscientious objector during World War II.


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7 APRIL 2011 — thursday

Richard Tillinghast and Alan Williamson

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Richard Tillinghast, Dirty August, and Alan Williamson, The Pattern More Complicated, New and Selected PoemsMoe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com; wheelchair accessible, ASL interpreters for the deaf and hearing impaired may be requested a week in advance by email, editor@poetryflash.org)

Richard Tillinghast is an American poet currently living in Ireland. In his Selected Poems, he has picked the best of his ten books of poems from four decades of his poetry. Louis Simpson has said, "Tillinghast's poems range confidently among different cultures. He has a sense of history as a living force." He has also published three nonfiction books, including Damaged Grandeur, a critical biography of Robert Lowell with whom he studied at Harvard, a book on Irish literature and culture, and a new book, Dirty August, a book of translations of the Turkish poet Edip Cansever that he co-translated with his daughter, Julia Clare Tillinghast.

Alan Williamson, who also studied with Lowell at Harvard, is a celebrated poet and critic. His most recent book of poems is The Pattern More Complicated, New and Selected Poems; Thomas Disch says, "If there were such a school as maximalism in poetry, Alan Williamson would be on the board of directors. His poems aim at the high sublime, and his aim is usually good." Four of Williamson's previous books are selected from in this volume, including The Muse of Distance, Love and the Soul, Res Publica, and Presence. He has also published four books of criticism and other prose, most recently Westernness: A Meditation, a first-person meditation on the literary and visual arts of the American West.


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10 APRIL 2011 — sunday

The Northern California Book Awards 2011

30th Annual Northern California Book Awards, Northern California authors are honored in Fiction, General Nonfiction, Creative Nonfiction, Poetry, Translation, and Children’s Literature, Fred Cody Lifetime Achievement Award will be presented to Afghan American writer, lecturer, editor and teacher Tamim Ansary, Special Recognition Award will be presented to Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry, edited by Neelanjana Banerjee, Summi Kaipa, and Pireeni Sundaralingam, awards are presented by Northern California Book Reviewers, Poetry Flash, Center for the Art of Translation, San Francisco Public Library and the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library, Red Room (redroom.com), PEN West, and Mechanics’ Institute, public reception with book signing follows, Koret Auditorium, San Francisco Main Public Library, 100 Larkin, enter at Grove, SF, free, 1:00 (Poetry Flash: 510/525-5476, for the nominees, see NCBA page.)


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14 APRIL 2011 — thursday

Deborah Bogen and Gerald Fleming

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Deborah Bogen, Let Me Open You a Swan, and Gerald Fleming, Night of Pure BreathingMoe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com; wheelchair accessible, ASL interpreters for the deaf and hearing impaired may be requested a week in advance by email, editor@poetryflash.org)

Let Me Open You a Swan is Deborah Bogen's second book of poems. Lynn Emanuel says of it, "The sharp intelligence of these poems manifests itself in muscular analogies and in images that bristle with complexity. Beauty is everything in this book…" Her first collection, Landscape with Silo won the 2005 X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize.

Gerald Fleming's new book of poems is Night of Pure Breathing. Gary Young says, "These dark fables, written in a language 'born of rage,' furiously peel back the veneer of the world we think we know. Part fairy tale, part dream, these poems explore a region where the ordinary and the fantastic overlap.…" Fleming's first book is Swimmer Climbing Onto Shore. He edited and published the literary magazine Barnabe Mountain Review; a teacher in San Francisco public schools for thirty-seven years, he's published three books for teachers.


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17 APRIL 2011 — sunday

Donna De La Perrière and Joseph Lease

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Donna De La Perriere, Saint Erasure, and Joseph Lease, Testify, Diesel, A Bookstore, 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, 3:00 (510/653-9965, dieselbookstore.com; wheelchair accessible, ASL interpreters for the deaf and hearing impaired may be requested a week in advance by email, editor@poetryflash.org)

Donna de la Perrière's new book of poems is Saint Erasure. Donald Revell praises it, "Here is a radiant palimpsest. Here is vision awash in vision itself." Her first collection was True Crime. Recipient of a 2009 Fund for Poetry Award, she curates the Bay Area Poetry Marathon summer reading series in San Francisco.

Joseph Lease's new book of poems is Testify. Gillian Conoley says, "In the tragic vein, written at the end of the American experiment, fueled by a desire like all lasting desires continually thwarted, struggling to be born, Testify places itself at the latest hour and era of commodification: 'my scream is a brand name'—and works to lift language and therefore being and spirit towards a new utterance: 'past the water's skin' 'body come undone' to a 'good old blank page.' Testify, a great book, places itself at America's street corner of Origin and Decay. A delicate, tentative lyricism arises full of want, and Lease is its astonished keeper." Lease's three previous books are Broken World, Human Rights, and The Room. His work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, edited by Robert Creeley, and he is the MFA Program in Writing Chair at California College of the Arts. Thomas Fink's A Different Sense of Power: Problem's of Community in Late-Twentieth-Century U.S. Poetry includes extensive analysis of Joseph Lease's work.


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9 MAY 2011 — monday

An Evening With Kay Ryan, US Poet Laureate 2008–2010

City Arts & Lectures presents former U.S. Poet Laureate Kay Ryan, The Best of It: New and Selected Poems, Herbst Theatre, SF, 401 Van Ness, SF, special $15 tickets for Poetry Flash readers, enter/mention discount code POET, 8:00 (tickets: 415/392-4400, www.cityboxoffice.com)

Kay Ryan writes distinctive poetry characterized by its brevity, imagery and wit. Deceptively simple, her compact poems delight with bracing wordplay, wry humor, and what the New York Times describes as "stealthy insights amid short phrases." The Best of It: New and Selected Poems, a finalist for the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award, just received the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry amid widespread praise. Her published collections include Strangely Marked Metal, Flamingo Watching, Say Uncle, and The Niagara River. Ryan was named the sixteenth Poet Laureate of the United States in 2008 and served two terms. A 2004 Guggenheim Fellow, Ryan's many other awards include the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, Ingram Merrill Award and the Pushcart Prize. She taught at College of Marin for over thirty years. "Ms. Ryan's poems are, in 2010, about as good as American poetry gets." —The New York Times


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12 MAY 2011 — thursday

Daphne Gottlieb and Danielle (Dani) Montgomery

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Daphne Gottlieb, 15 Ways to Stay Alive, and Danielle (Dani) Montgomery, The Woman You Write Poems AboutMoe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com; wheelchair accessible, ASL interpreters for the deaf and hearing impaired may be requested a week in advance by email, editor@poetryflash.org)

Daphne Gottlieb's new book of poetry is 15 Ways to Stay Alive, in which "broken hearts, scattered dreams, postpunk politics, and postmodern cut-up collages come together to explore survival after personal and communal disaster." A performance poet and spoken word artist, she earned her MFA at Mills College and is also the author and editor of nine books, including the poetry collections Kissing Dead Girls, Why Things Burn, and Pelt, as well as the graphic novel Jokes and the Unconscious, with artist Diane DiMassa. Final Girl was the winner of the Audre Lorde Award in Poetry and was named one of the Village Voice's Favorite Books of 2003; she was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award three times. Widely published in journals and anthologies, her work has been translated into Turkish and Greek, and has inspired theatrical adaptations and DJ-remixes. Besides anchoring three national performance poetry tours, Gottlieb has also appeared with the all-girl performance poetry troupe Sister Spit and has performed at festivals coast-to-coast, including South by Southwest, Bumbershoot, and Ladyfest Bay Area.

Danielle Montgomery's recent book of poems is The Woman You Write Poems About. Thea Hillman says, "In Danielle Montgomery's poetry, faith rides shotgun with hopelessness, and at the last minute grabs the wheel, dropping us off at our destination salvation." She writes about class, economic struggle, and the search for sanity and human dignity.


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20 MAY 2011 — friday

An Evening With Robert Bly

SOLD OUT! KPFA Benefits presents a rare Bay Bay reading by poet Robert Bly, Talking Into the Ear of a Donkey, with musicians Bruce Hamm on sarode and Jim Santi Owen on tabla, Nils Peterson introduces, co-sponsored by Poetry Flash, The Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar Street, Berkeley, $21/$17 for Hillside Club members, 7:30 (href="">www.kpfa.org/events)


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29 MAY 2011 — sunday

Genine Lentine and Sean Labrador y Manzano

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Genine Lentine, Mr. Worthington's Beautiful Experiments on Splashes, and Sean Labrador y Manzano, recently featured in McSweeney's, Diesel, A Bookstore, 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, 3:00 (510/653-9965, dieselbookstore.com; wheelchair accessible, ASL interpreters for the deaf and hearing impaired may be requested a week in advance by email, editor@poetryflash.org)

Genine Lentine's Mr. Worthington's Beautiful Experiments on Splashes was published in 2010 by New Michigan Press. Another chapbook, Poses: An Essay Drawn from the Model was published in August by the g.e. Series at Books and Bookshelves. The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden, her collaboration with Stanley Kunitz and photographer Marnie Crawford Samuelson was published by W.W. Norton in 2005. She recently contributed an essay to Rebecca Solnit's Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas. Ongoing public projects include Listening Booth and The Heinous Task Table, both of which took shape in a 2009 Project Space residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts. She received an MS in Theoretical Linguistics from Georgetown University and an MFA in Poetry from New York University. She teaches an ongoing Sunday Writing Studio and curates the Nothing is Hidden reading series at the San Francisco Zen Center.

Sean Labrador y Manzano is a single father, a poet of postcolonial eroticism, and independent scholar. He believes in poetic justice: that one day soon he can pay all his bills (child support, student loans, credit cards, etc) through writing. In the mean time he ambles from gig to gig to gig. The experience of underemployment compels him to contemplate at wartime cafés (as all cafés are wartime cafés during a time of war) the benefits and contradictions of military reenlistment. His piece, "Conversations at a Wartime Café," is featured on McSweeney's, www.mcsweeneys.net. While employed at various oddjobs, he teaches high school English, History and Government and coordinates the Garden Club. He curates at Bollyhood (3372 19th Street, San Francisco) the monthly San Francisco Bay Area MFA Mixer, bringing in graduate students writers representing the Bay Area's MFA programs. He edits the anthology (series) Conversations at the Wartime Cafe. The first volume, A Decade of War, will be released 9/11/11.



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2 JUNE 2011 — thursday


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12 JUNE 2011 — sunday


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26 JUNE 2011 — sunday


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30 JUNE 2011 — thursday


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7 JULY 2011 — thursday

James Maughn and Matthew Shears

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Matthew Shears, Where a road had been, and James Maughn, The Arakaki Permutations, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com; wheelchair accessible, ASL interpreters for the deaf and hearing impaired may be requested a week in advance by email, editor@poetryflash.org)

James Maughn's new book of poems is The Arakaki Permutations. Joshua McKinney says of it, "James Maughn continues his uncompromising engagement with the catechisms of martial kata and their intersection with the forms of writing. Delving deeper into the heart of his own poems, he engages the particularities of technical application—of timing and distance—that comprise his own poetic waza, or practice. By disclosing the textures and subtleties of language, even to the level of the syllable, Maughn illuminates the architecture of meaning. The result is a collection of remarkable poems that discover a boundless freedom within the structure of form." Maughn's first book of poems is Kata. He lives in Santa Cruz where he hosts A New Cadence Poetry Series and co-edits the literary arts journal Ping Pong, published by the Henry Miller Memorial Library.

Matthew Shears first book of poems is Where a road had been. Claudia Keelan says of it, "…Matt Shears tenderly engages a syntax of wholeness. Dedicated solely to the process of re-membering, this debut collection locates an aboriginal utterance, a native and loving sound that, remarkably, erases all thought of Otherness." His poetry can be found in Cutbank, Notre Dame Review, and Boston Review; portions of Where a road had been can be found online at Cricket Online Review, Alice Blue Review, and BlazeVOX. He contributed a nonfiction essay, "Kettleman City" to The Devil's Punchbowl: A Cultural & Geographic Map of California Today, and he is currently at work on a book of poetry, some unclassifiable wildness and a novel. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at California College of the Arts.


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10 JULY 2011 — sunday

Atsuro Riley and Alexandra Teague

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Atsuro Riley, Romey's Order, 2011 Kate Tufts Discovery Award-winner, and Alexandra Teague, Mortal Geography, 2011 California Book Award Gold Medal recipient, Diesel, A Bookstore, 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, 3:00 (510/653-9965, dieselbookstore.com; wheelchair accessible, ASL interpreters for the deaf and hearing impaired may be requested a week in advance by email, editor@poetryflash.org)

Atsuro Riley's first book of poems is Romey's Order, winner of the inaugural The Believer Poetry Award. Kay Ryan says, "Atsuro Riley's Romey's Order is deep craft—brilliant and consuming and thoroughly strange. When you put this book down, American poetry will be different than when you picked it up." Among Riley's honors are a Pushcart Prize, a Wood Prize from Poetry magazine, and the prestigious Kate Tufts Discovery Award for 2011.

Alexandra Teague's Mortal Geography was the winner of the 2009 Lexi Budnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry, and received the 2011 California Book Award's Gold Medal in Poetry. Eavan Boland says, "There is a haunting narrative purpose in this book, and these poems manage a true power and distinction in realizing it." A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, Teague has been widely published in literary journals and anthologized in Best American Poetry 2000, Best New Poets 2008, and The Yale Anthology of Younger American Poetry.


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14 JULY 2011 — thursday

Launch Party for Visions & Affiliations: A California Literary Time Line

Poetry Flash presents the launch of the long awaited Visions & Affiliations: A California Literary Time Line: Poets & Poetry 1940–2005, with author/editor Jack Foley, and readings by poets Jack and Adelle Foley, Ivan Argüelles, Mary-Marcia Casoly, Lucille Lang Day, Katherine Hastings, Andrew Joron, Michael McClure, and Al Young, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com; wheelchair accessible, ASL interpreters for the deaf and hearing impaired may be requested a week in advance by email, editor@poetryflash.org)

Visions & Affiliations: A California Literary Time Line: Poets & Poetry 1940–2005, by Jack Foley has been praised by Lawrence Ferlinghetti: "Jack Foley is doing great things in articulating the poetic consciousness of San Francisco." This two-volume work is a chronoencyclopedia of over sixty-five years of California poetry beginning with the publication of Kenneth Rexroth's first book of poems. The writing deals with people, ideas, stories, opinions, argumentation, all focused on the incredibly rich, kaleidoscopic scene of poetry in California in the second half of the twentieth century and surging on into the twenty-first. As Foley, himself, says, "If there is any Urgrund in this book, it is the constantly changing, endlessly conflictive fabric of time." Jack and Adelle Foley will introduce the following poets all of whom have work quoted in the time line and will each read briefly: poet Ivan Argüelles, who is also the book's publisher, Pantograph Press; Mary-Marcia Casoly, Run to Tenderness; Lucille Lang Day, The Curvature of Blue, poems; Katherine Hastings, Updraft; Northern California Book Award nominee Andrew Joron, Trance Archive: New and Selected Poems; legendary Beat poet Michael McClure, Of Indigo and Saffron: New and Selected Poems; and Al Young, California Poet Laureate Emeritus.


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7 AUGUST 2011 — sunday

Xochiquetzal Candelaria and Robin Ekiss

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Xochiquetzal Candelaria, Empire, and Robin Ekiss, The Mansion of Happiness, Diesel, A Bookstore, 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, 3:00 (510/653-9965, dieselbookstore.com; wheelchair accessible, ASL interpreters for the deaf and hearing impaired may be requested a week in advance by email, editor@poetryflash.org)

Xochiquetzal Candelaria's debut book of poems is Empire. Cathy Park Hong says, "Empire is a sensuous and lucid meditation on lineage from the haunting and mythic narratives of her ancestry to her tautly drawn memories of growing up in California. It is a book of tender and deeply imagined songs." Among her honors are a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Gulf Coast Poetry Prize, the Louisiana Prize for Poetry, and the 2006 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize.

Robin Ekiss's first book of poems is The Mansion of Happiness. Carl Phillips says, "The Mansion of Happiness is a wondrous, instructive, and everywhere graceful book, and marks the arrival of a confident and haunting new voice." She is a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University; the Rona Jaffe Award for emerging women writers and the 2010 Shenandoah/ Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers are among her honors.


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8 SEPTEMBER 2011 — thursday

Zara Raab and Keith Ekiss

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Zara Raab, Swimming the Eel, and Keith Ekiss, Pima Road Notebook, Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com)

Keith Ekiss's book of poems is Pima Road Notebook. Eavan Boland writes, "These poems create a bold and intense landscape. In deft, musical language they persuade the reader that the history of the land is almost always a personal history. It is this eloquent interweaving of life and place that makes this such a compelling first collection." A former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford, his poems have appeared in Blackbird, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, New England Review, Southwestern American Literature. His creative nonfiction has been anthologized in Permanent Vacation: Living and Working in Our National Parks.

Zara Raab's first full-length book of poems is Swimming the Eel. Stephen Kessler says, "Swimming the Eel is a moving and impressive work of art. Its family history feels both intimate and mythic…a combination of formal coherence and musical fluency…a beautifully sustained sequence of poems." She's also the author of the chapbook The Book of Gretel. Her poetry has been widely published in literary journals like Crab Orchard Review and Nimrod, her essays and reviews in Poetry Flash, Redwood Coast Review, Colorado Review and elsewhere.


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11 SEPTEMBER 2011 — sunday

Maxine Hong Kingston and James Ragan

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Maxine Hong Kingston, reading from her memoir-in-verse I Love a Broad Margin to My Life, and James Ragan, Too Long A Solitude, Diesel, A Bookstore, 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, 3:00 (510/653-9965, dieselbookstore.com; wheelchair accessible, ASL interpreters for the deaf and hearing impaired may be requested a week in advance by email, editor@poetryflash.org)

Maxine Hong Kingston's new book is a memoir-in-verse, I Love a Broad Margin to My Life. Her previous memoirs and books of fiction include The Woman Warrior, China Men, Tripmaster Monkey, and The Fifth Book of Peace. She is also the editor of Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace, writings from more than a decade of writing-and-meditation workshops she's led for Vietnam veterans and others to heal themselves through art. Among her honors are the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, PEN West Award in Fiction, and a National Humanities Medal from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

James Ragan's new book of poems is Too Long A Solitude, which C.K. Williams has praised as "fine-grained, a remarkable range of history." Among his previous books of poems are In the Talking Hours, Womb-Weary, and The Hunger Wall. In 1985 he was one of three Americans, including Bob Dylan and Robert Bly, invited to perform their poetry at the First International Poetry Festival in Moscow. He has also written for stage and film and worked in various production capacities for many films, among them the Academy Award-winning The Deer Hunter. His most recent films are The Last Story of the Century, based on the siege of Sarajevo, and The Shoe.


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15 SEPTEMBER 2011 — thursday

Maxine Chernoff and Jaime Robles

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Maxine Chernoff, To Be Read in the Dark, and Jaime Robles, Anime, Animus, Anima, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com; wheelchair accessible, ASL interpreters for the deaf and hearing impaired may be requested a week in advance by email, editor@poetryflash.org)

Maxine Chernoff's brand new Omnidawn chapbook, To Be Read in the Dark, will debut at this event. Both a poet and a fiction writer, she is the author of three books of short stories and three novels. Her most recent books are the short story collection Some of Her Friends That Year and the poetry books The Turning, Among the Names, World, and Evolution of the Bridge: Selected Prose Poems. She also won the 2009 PEN Translation Award as co-translator of The Selected Works of Friedrich Hölderlin.

Jaime Robles's new book of poems is Anime, Animus, Anima. She co-founded Five Trees Press, an award-winning literary press in San Francisco and currently is editor and publisher of Five Fingers Press and Woodland Editions. Jaime Robles writes text for both musical and visual settings as well as poetry. With her musical collaborator, composer Peter Joseff, she premiered the one act chamber opera Inferno in Berkeley in 2009; their one act opera Diary was produced in San Francisco in 2004.


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24 SEPTEMBER 2011 — saturday

Gloria Frym, Joseph Lease and Donna de la Perrière

Moe’s and Poetry Flash co-present a 100 Thousand Poets for Change reading by Gloria Frym, Mind over Matter, Donna de la Perrière, Saint Erasure, and Joseph Lease, Testify, Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, note early time, 7:00 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com)

Gloria Frym's new book of poetry is Mind over Matter. Rae Armantrout asks, "How does the present imprint itself on language, on poetry? Gloria Frym's Mind over Matter shows us that: the outlines of the endless wars, the credit default swaps. But it also shows poetry resisting this…This book makes me want to cheer." Frym is both a poet and a short story writer; her books of poems include Homeless at Home and By Ear; her story collections include Distance No Object and How I Learned. She teaches at California College of the Arts.

Donna de la Perrière's second book of poems is Saint Erasure. Donald Revell says, "in Saint Erasure, we may witness, with the leisure of true virtue, poetry's essential miracle.ŠThe curve of a cheekbone becomes eternal love, and memory an ocean. Here is a radiant palimpsest. Here is vision awash in vision itself." She teaches at California College of the Arts and San Francisco State University and curates the Bay Area Poetry Marathon.

Joseph Lease's new book is Testify. Julie Carr says, "Šhe is one of the few writers I have ever read who unveils the deeply personal in the political. We are his grateful readers, for we need this book now." He is also the author of Broken World, Human Rights, and The Room. His poems have been featured on NPR and published in or selected for The AGNI 30th Anniversary Poetry Anthology, VQR, Bay Poetics, Paris Review, The Best American Poetry, and the forthcoming Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (second edition). He chairs the MFA Program in Writing at California College of the Arts.


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6 OCTOBER 2011 — thursday

Richard O. Moore and Linda Norton

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Linda Norton, The Public Gardens: Poems and History, and Richard O. Moore, Writing the Silences, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com; wheelchair accessible, ASL interpreters for the deaf and hearing impaired may be requested a week in advance by email, editor@poetryflash.org)

Richard O. Moore's latest book Writing the Silences, edited by Brenda Hillman and Paul Ebenkamp with a foreword by Hillman, was selected from seven full-length manuscripts he wrote between 1946 and 2008; Dan Beachy-Quick says, "Here is poetry that reminds its readers that a poem is as much a crucible of thinking as it is a crucible of belief, that philosophical doubt and mythic vision do not oppose each other…" It was nominated for the 2011 Northern California Book Award. He is the last of the legendary poets of the San Francisco Renaissance, part of Kenneth Rexroth's circle in the 1940s; he is also a photographer, a filmmaker, and had a career in public broadcasting that includes the co-founding of KPFA.

Linda Norton's first full-length book of poems is The Public Gardens. Fanny Howe, who wrote the introduction, says, "Part poetry, part notebooks, it is a model of the camera made human, made humanist, a part of arm, leg, hand, a moving-picture taken pregnant with literature." She has also published the chapbook The Hesitation Kit. Her career as a book person has included a stint as editor at the University of California Press and currently as senior editor for The Bancroft Library on the University of California, Berkeley campus.


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20 OCTOBER 2011 — thursday

Nina Corwin and Andrena Zawinski

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Nina Corwin, The Uncertainty of Maps, and Andrena Zawinski, Something About, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com; wheelchair accessible, ASL interpreters for the deaf and hearing impaired may be requested a week in advance by email, editor@poetryflash.org)

Nina Corwin's new book of poems is The Uncertainty of Maps. Cyrus Cassells says of it, "I love the witty, rich urban music of Nina Corwin's poems, her blazingly inclusive lines that allow the world and her savvy perceptions of it to come rushing in." Her first book of poems is Conversations with Friendly Demons and Tainted Saints. She co-edited the anthology Inhabiting the Body: A Collection of Poetry and Art by Women, and she is Advisory Editor for Fifth Wednesday Journal as well as the curator of literary events at Woman Made Gallery in Chicago, where she lives and works as a psychotherapist.

Andrena Zawinski's new book of poems is Something About, which won a 2010 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award. Lynn Emanuel calls her "an articulate, urbane, sophisticated voice…the poems seethe with savvy and are packed with a bristling ironic intelligence." Her previous collections include Taking the Road Where it Leads and Traveling in Reflected Light, which won the Kenneth Patchen Prize in Poetry from Pig Iron Press. Her work has been widely published and anthologized, and she's been Features Editor at poetrymagazine.com since 2000.


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23 OCTOBER 2011 — sunday

Celebration for Kenneth Patchen: A Centennial Selection

Poetry Flash presents a celebration for Kenneth Patchen: A Centennial Selection, on the late poet, prose writer, and picture-poem artist Kenneth Patchen, with readings of Patchen's work and remembrances from Willis Barnstone, Florence Miller, Jack Marshall, David Meltzer, GP Skratz, and the book's publisher, Bart Schneider of Kelly's Cove Press, hosted by Richard Silberg, Diesel, A Bookstore, 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, 3:00 (510/653-9965, dieselbookstore.com; wheelchair accessible, ASL interpreters for the deaf and hearing impaired may be requested a week in advance by email, editor@poetryflash.org)

Poet and translator Willis Barnstone, poet and memorist Jack Marshall, poet David Meltzer, poet and educator Florence Miller, poet, novelist, Kelly's Cove Press publisher Bart Schneider, and performance poet GP Skratz present commentary and readings from the work of poet, prose writer, and picture-poem artist Kenneth Patchen, with host Richard Silberg.

Kenneth Patchen, one of the twentieth century's leading experimental writers of poetry and prose, gained widespread attention with The Journal of Albion Moonlight (1941). His readings of poetry and jazz were a phenomenon in the 1950s. Almost forty years after his death, Patchen's works continue to intrigue lovers of modern literature worldwide. Born in 1911 in the Ohio steel-mill town of Niles, he lived mainly on the East Coast until 1950, when he and his wife, Miriam, moved to San Francisco. Living in North Beach, he created his "painted books" and performed poetry-jazz in the City's avant-garde clubs. A back injury restricted his activities in the late 1950s; they moved to Palo Alto, where Patchen continued to write and paint until his death at 61.

Kenneth Patchen: A Centennial Selection features poems, drawings, paintings, and painting-poems, some reproduced for the first time in color, spanning the author's career. Printer and photographer Jonathan Clark, editor of this book, befriended Kenneth and Miriam Patchen in the 1960s. He helped establish the Patchen archive at University of California, Santa Cruz Library and is executor of the Patchen estate.

"Like Whitman, Patchen was an American Visionary. Our Blake. Key texts like The Journal of Albion Moonlight & Sleepers Awake remain as unique as Leaves of Grass or Moby Dick. Tender poet, angry singer, Patchen endures even in his apparent absence from the litter of Literature studied in English Departments. Shame."

—David Meltzer



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3 NOVEMBER 2011 — thursday

Mary Mackey and Susan Kolodny

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Mary Mackey, Sugar Zone, and Susan Kolodny, After the Firestorm, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com; wheelchair accessible, ASL interpreters for the deaf and hearing impaired may be requested a week in advance by email, editor@poetryflash.org)

Susan Kolodny's debut poetry book is After the Firestorm. Brian Teare wrote of it, "Figuring consciousness not as a stream but as a body of water composed of layers of clarity and obscurity, Susan Kolodny's wise poems ask 'Do we risk more when we look/ or when we look away?' It's this question that weds lyric poet and psychoanalyst, both of whom make shapes that hold experience so that its depths and complexities can be seen into more fully." Her work has appeared in many literary journals and anthologies, including New England Review, River Styx, Beloit Poetry Journal, and The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems of the San Francisco Watershed. A psychoanalyst living in Oakland, she is also the author of The Captive Muse: On Creativity and Its Inhibition.

Mary Mackey's new book of poems is Sugar Zone. Jane Hirshfield says, "Mary Mackey's crisp-edged perceptions are set down in this new collection of poems with a sensuous, compassionate, and utterly unflinching eye." She is the author of four previous books of poems, most recently Breaking the Fever, and she's published eleven novels, including The Notorious Mrs. Winston, A Grand Passion, and The Year the Horses Came. Her work has been translated into many foreign languages. A former president of the West Coast branch of PEN, she is also a writer of screenplays with the award-winning film Silence to her credit.


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10 NOVEMBER 2011 — thursday

Gary Young and Eliot Schain

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Gary Young, Pleasure, and Eliot Schain, Westering Angels, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com; wheelchair accessible, ASL interpreters for the deaf and hearing impaired may be requested a week in advance by email, editor@poetryflash.org)

Gary Young's newest book of poem is Pleasure. Jane Hirshfield calls him "…unflinching, stringent in beauty, austerely moving." He has won the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. Among his other publications, No Other Life brings together his poetic trilogy Days, Braver Deeds, and If He Had. He is also a book artist whose work appears in the Museum of Modern Art and elsewhere.

Eliot Schain's most recent book of poems is Westering Angels about which D. Nurkse says, "Some artists have irony, some have vision; Schain has both, and tests them against each other with fire and wit." He is anthologized in Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems and Poetics from California and The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems of the San Francisco Bay Watershed.


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13 NOVEMBER 2011 — sunday

Sharon Doubiago and Lindy Hough

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Sharon Doubiago, My Father's Love: The Legacy, Volume II, and Lindy Hough, Wild Horses, Wild Dreams, New and Selected Poems 1971-2010, Diesel, A Bookstore, 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, 3:00 (510/653-9965, dieselbookstore.com; wheelchair accessible, ASL interpreters for the deaf and hearing impaired may be requested a week in advance by email, editor@poetryflash.org)

Poet and prose writer Sharon Doubiago will read from the second volume of her memoir My Father's Love, this volume entitled "The Legacy." The center of this book is father-daughter incest; Lynn Sacco says of it, "…her prose achieves the power of poetry, demonstrating as much as describing the pain, fear, and dislocation that incest created in her family." Doubiago is a celebrated poet and fiction writer, making her name with the feminist epic Hard Country. She's won three Pushcart Prizes for poetry and fiction; among her other honors, Psyche Drives the Coast won the Oregon Book Award for Poetry, and her book-length poem South America Mi Hija was twice nominated for a National Book Award and was selected best book of the year by the LA Weekly.

Lindy Hough's new book of poems is Wild Horses, Wild Dreams, New and Selected Poems 1971-2010. Bobby Byrd says, "I'm delighted to follow along, as the poems pick a way through intellectual, cultural, and personal histories. They are hers, but mine too. These wild horses, these wild dreams—she's become wise in the making of her poems." She is the author of four books of poetry and the editor of Nuclear Strategy and the Code of the Warrior. Along with her husband Richard Grossinger she founded the literary magazine Io in the 1960s and North Atlantic Books in the 1970s.


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17 NOVEMBER 2011 — thursday

Madeline Tiger and Barbara Joan Tiger Bass

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Madeline Tiger, The Atheist's Prayer, and Barbara Joan Tiger Bass, Outcome of Sensation, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com; wheelchair accessible, ASL interpreters for the deaf and hearing impaired may be requested a week in advance by email, editor@poetryflash.org)

Madeline Tiger's new book of poems is The Atheist's Prayer. Alicia Ostriker says, "To read Madeline Tiger's poetry is like flowing with the river of life itself…Life, love and death are her subjects—not the abstractions but the details, and she gets the details right." Her most recent books of poems are The Earth Which Is All and Birds of Sorrow and Joy: New and Selected Poems, 1970–2000.

Barbara Joan Tiger Bass's new book of poems is Outcome of Sensation. Her poetry has been anthologized in Women's Ways of Leading and widely published in literary journals, including the Paterson Literary Review, Manzanita, and Sisyphus. She's also a playwright; her children's musical Kochka was performed in Sacramento and Davis, and her play Sessions received a staged reading in Berkeley.


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