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2012 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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12 JANUARY 2012 — thursday

Terry Ehret, Bart Schneider and Mike Tuggle

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Terry Ehret, Night Sky Journey, Bart Schneider, Morning Opera and Mike Tuggle, What Lures the Foxes, 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)

All three of these poets’ books are among the initial offerings of the new, Berkeley-based Kelly’s Cove Press. Night Sky Journey is Terry Ehret’s fourth book of poems. Ursula K. Le Guin says of it, “Her play with forms works always towards ease and freedom. Her timing is faultless, a joy in itself; and her fearlessness is exhilarating.” Among her honors are publication in the National Poetry Series, the California Book Award, and the Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize. A co-founder of Sixteen Rivers Press, she is a former poet laureate of Sonoma County. Morning Opera is Bart Schneider’s second book of poems. Jim Moore says of it, “There is mystery at the heart of things…And at the heart of the mystery there is a music which Bart Schneider has found a way to make a home for in these poems.” Schneider is also the acclaimed author of four novels, perhaps the best known of which is Man in the Blizzard. He is the publisher of Kelly’s Cove Press; he also was the founding editor of Hungry Mind Review. What Lures the Foxes is Mike Tuggle’s third book of poems. Jonah Raskin praises it: “After reading these poems you know they’ve been handcrafted, then held like a rock or a flower before being released into the world.” A former poet laureate of Sonoma County, he is the recipient of a Dickens Award in fiction and the Oberon Poetry Prize.


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19 JANUARY 2012 — thursday

Bill Mayer, Larry Felson, and Steven Rood

Poetry Flash presents a Paroikia Press reading by poets Bill Mayer, Articulate Matter, Steven Rood, I Say Your Name, and Larry Felson, Dawn Out of Order, 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)

The new Berkeley-based Paroikia Press will be publishing books by all three of these East Bay poets. Larry Felson is the author of Salt and Silver and Body Song. One of the five poets featured in the anthology, Five on the Western Edge, his poems have been published in American Poetry Review and other publications. He has taught English and Journalism at Oakland High for many years and recently taught at the Hellenic International Studies in the Arts (HISA) on the island of Paros, Greece. He is a fiery, headlong, passionate poet, a poet as much political as essentially human. Articulate Matter, Bill Mayer's fourth book of poems, will launch Paroikia Press at this reading. Grace Schulman enthuses about it, "The best of these poems are transcendent, bringing the sacred into common life." Mayer is also a professional photographer who worked with Tony Keppelman on Hummingbirds, a photographic essay published by Little, Brown. I Say Your Name, Steven Rood's first full-length book of poems, is forthcoming from Paroikia; his writing weaves together humor, a deep, plain-spoken conviction, and mystery. All three of these poets have been decades-long participants in a workshop begun in 1966 in the Haight-Ashbury by poets Jack Gilbert, Linda Gregg, Wilbur Wood, and Elizabeth Hughes which continues to this day, now situated in Berkeley.


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29 JANUARY 2012 — sunday

Terry Wolverton and Devreaux Baker

Poetry Flash presents a reading by LA novelist and poet Terry Wolverton, Stealing Angel, and Mendocino poet Devreaux Baker, Red Willow People, 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)

Terry Wolverton’s new book is a novel, Stealing Angel, dealing with questions of custody, child abuse, conflict between lesbian lovers, set, for the crux of its action, in a spiritual commune in the southern Baja town of Todos Santos. Wolverton has published Embers, a novel-in-poems, two other prose novels, a memoir, a short story collection, and several books of poems. She’s edited fourteen literary anthologies, including (with Robert Drake) the award-winning six-volume series: His: Brilliant New Fiction by Gay Men and Hers: Brilliant New Fiction by Lesbians. From a working-class background, she is a feminist, an activist, and the founder of Writers At Work, a creative writing center in L.A.

Devreaux Baker's new book of poems is Red Willow People. Jack Hirschman says of it, "A brava book of poems by a poet who knows how to surrender to all that metaphor can still make happen…she is returning the land that is Native American to the People she enunciates, in a form of a book, and not simply a book that she's written. And that is the wonderful mystery this work evokes." Baker has published to previous books of poetry, Beyond the Circumstance of Sight and Light at the Edge, and she was an editor of Wood, Water, Air and Fire: The Anthology of Mendocino County Women Poets.


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2 FEBRUARY 2012 — thursday

Rose Black and Daniel Joseph Polikoff

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Rose Black, Winter Light, and Daniel Joseph Polikoff, Dragon Ship and The Hands of Stars, 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)

Rose Black's newest book of poems is Winter Light. David St. John says of it, "Rose Black is a remarkable and heartbreaking poet. Her meditations on the passages of experience and the psychological resonances of childhood are compelling and powerful…" Both of her books of poems—the first is Clearing—are prose poetry. Her poetry has appeared in Runes, South Carolina Review, Wisconsin Review, Ninth Letter, Spillway and Slant. She is Associate Editor of the Marin Poetry Center Anthology.

Daniel Joseph Polikoff will be reading from his two books of poetry, Dragon Ship and The Hands of Stars. He is also the author of a new critical biography, In the Image of Orpheus: Rilke: A Soul History, a book that blends archetypal psychology and biography with an in-depth reading of Rilke's poetry and prose, drawing on such sources as psychologists Jung and James Hillman, Plato, Petrarch, Lou Andreas-Salomé, and many more. Polikoff has also published a dramatic version of the Grail legend, Parzival/Gawain: Two Plays, an edited translation of Der Gral, by A.M. Miller.


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9 FEBRUARY 2012 — thursday

Louise Glück and Dana Levin

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Louise Glück, A Village Life, and Dana Levin, Sky Burial, 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)

Louise Glück’s new book of poems, her eleventh, is A Village Life. Rain Taxi says, “Though it resembles her others least, A Village Life may come to be seen as Glück’s most beautiful and moving book so far…[It] shows a ripening of Glück’s genius, her mastery for depicting the things of this earth…” One of America’s most renowned poets, her honors include a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Critics Circle Award, the Bollingen Prize, and a Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. Sky Burial is Dana Levin's third book of poems. The New Yorker writes: "Sky Burial brings a wealth of ritual and lore from various strains of Buddhism, as well as Mesoamerican and other spiritual traditions…the intensity and seriousness and openness of her investigations make Levin's use of this material utterly her own, and utterly riveting." Sky Burial was listed one of the Best Books of Poetry 2011 by the San Francisco Chronicle, Library Journal, and Coldfront Magazine. Levin's first book of poems, In the Surgical Theatre, was chosen by Louise Glück in 1999 for the coveted APR/Honickman First Book Prize.


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26 FEBRUARY 2012 — sunday

Willis Barnstone and Stanley Moss

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Willis Barnstone, Stickball on 88th Street, and Stanley Moss, God Breaketh Not All Men’s Hearts Alike: New & Later Collected 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)

Willis Barnstone is a much-celebrated, much-published poet, translator, scholar, and editor. He’s been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, has just published his translation of the New Testament in two volumes, has translated Rilke, Sappho, Mao Tse-Tung—just to give a quick sketch of his accomplishments. He’ll be celebrating two new books of poems, Café de l’Aube à Paris, which is in both English and French, and Stickball on 88th Street, about which Joseph Stroud says, “The poems are a vivid glimpse into a Depression America on the threshold of a World War and the record of an interior journey of a boy encountering those elements that would shape him into the artist and man he is to become.” Stanley Moss’s new book of poems is God Breaketh Not All Men’s Hearts Alike: New & Later Collected Poems. W.S. Merwin says, “Again and again, coming upon a poem of Stanley Moss’s, I have had the feeling of being taken by surprise…The surprise arose from the nature of his poetry itself, and from the mystery that his poems confront and embody, which makes them both intense and memorable.” Among his many books of poems are A History of Color, Asleep in the Garden, The Intelligence of Clouds, and The Skull of Adam. He is the founding editor and publisher of Sheep Meadow Press.


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15 MARCH 2012 — thursday

Lorna Dee Cervantes and Barbara Jane Reyes

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Lorna Dee Cervantes, Ciento: 100 100-Word Love Poems, and Barbara Jane Reyes, Diwata, 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)

Lorna Dee Cervantes new book of poems is Ciento: 100 100-Word Love Poems. Luis Alberto Urrea says, "In this delightful book, Lorna Dee Cervantes has undertaken a mad discipline: the 100 word format unleashes paradoxically vast effects. Full of playfulness, rage and her traditional fire, Ciento is a masterful performance." Through her writing, she played an important part in the Chicano literary movement, and through Mango, the literary journal she founded, as well as through her small press of the same name. Author of three previous books of poems, she has received numerous honors and awards, including an American Book Prize for her first collection, Emplumada, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and a Lila Wallace Readers Digest Fellowship. Barbara Jane Reyes's latest book of poems is Diwata—which means, roughly, 'spirit' in Tagalog—a book which begins in a fusion of Genesis with a Philippine creation myth. Juan Felipe Herrera says of it, "Š[S]he instructs us, lures us, takes us deep into her sacred, jeweled river, then breathes into us our Creation Story—the one we thought we could no longer remember or write or speak or call our own." Born in Manila and then raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, Reyes is the author of two previous books, the second of which, Poeta en San Francisco, won the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets.


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18 MARCH 2012 — sunday

Giovanni Singleton and Sarah Menefee

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Sarah Menefee, I’m Not Thousandfurs and The Blood About the Heart, and Giovanni Singleton, Ascension, 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)

Sarah Menefee has published two full-length books of poems, I’m Not Thousandfurs and The Blood About the Heart. Tom Clark says, “Menefee’s poems are down to earth and humanly real. They are ‘political’ in the deepest sense; that is, they offer attention, emotion and support to life itself.” She has been a homeless and anti-hunger activist and is a founding member of the League of Revolutionaries for a New America. giovanni singleton’s Ascension, to be published in early 2012, is her first full-length book of poems. Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon says, “giovanni singleton lets silence do its work.…The poems are minimalist, while engaging a concern for the historical, the personal, the spiritual.…I hear Lucille Clifton—saying the human, the human—when I read this.…” giovanni singleton’s work was recently selected for the biennial New American Poet Series by the Poetry Society of America. Founder of nocturnes (re)view, an acclaimed journal dedicated to artists and writers of the African Diaspora and other contested spaces, she is also coordinator of Lunch Poems, the monthly poetry reading series in the Morrison Room of the Doe Library on the UC Berkeley campus.


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22 MARCH 2012 — thursday

Chad Sweeney and MFA Poets from CSU-San Bernardino

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Chad Sweeney and MFA Poets from CSU-San Bernardino: Nikia Chaney, Natalie Skeith, Andre Katkov, John Perham and Melissa Haklitch, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com)

Chad Sweeney's two new books are The Art of Stepping Through Time, Selected Poems, his co-translation of the poetry of H.E. Sayeh, one of Iran's most celebrated poets, and his own Wolf Milk: Lost Poems of Juan Sweeney. He is the author of three previous books of poems, most recently Parables of Hide and Seek, about which Bob Hicok says, "Chad Sweeney's poems are matryoshka dolls of imagination: strangeness inside longing inside charm. Relentlessly figurative, they read as dreamscapes and translations: if the human soul has peripheral vision, these poems are what it sees." His poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2008 and Verse Daily. With David Holler is the editor of the literary journal Parthenon West Review. Chad Sweeney teaches poetry in the MFA program at California State University, San Bernardino. On a road trip from southern California, he will be sharing this reading with graduate student poets from the CSU-San Bernardino program.


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29 MARCH 2012 — thursday

Susan Cohen and Rebecca Foust

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Susan Cohen, Throat Singing, and Rebecca Foust, All That Gorgeous Pitiless Song, 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 Cohen's first full-length book of poems is Throat Singing. Jeanne Wagner says of it, "With a combination of artistry and investigative skill, Susan Cohen probes both life's domestic tenderness and its restless incongruities.…Unstintingly, this book satisfies our quest for the poem that 'surfaces, re-surfaces, and keeps glistening.'" She comes to poetry out of a long, varied, prize-winning career as a journalist, a reporter and magazine writer for the San Jose Mercury News, and as a faculty member of the Graduate School of Journalism at University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of books on science, health policy, and ethics.

Rebecca Foust won the 2008 Many Mountains Moving Poetry Book Prize for All That Gorgeous Pitiless Song. David Baker praises it, "Her remarkable strength, vision, and good-spirited clarity carry these poems from the Alleghenies to the California coast, from wild swans to the daily gifts and domestic traumas that shape and sustain a life." Her other books include God, Seed, environmental poetry with art by Lorna Stevens, and the two chapbooks Mom's Canoe and Dark Card, which won the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize in 2007 and 2008.


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1 APRIL 2012 — sunday

Judy Halebsky and Jacqueline Kudler

Poetry Flash presents a Sixteen Rivers Press book launch, poetry reading by Judy Halebsky, Space/Gap/Interval, and Jacqueline Kudler, Easing into Dark, 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)

These two books are new releases from the Bay Area collective, Sixteen Rivers Press. Judy Halebsky’s new book of poems is Space/Gap/Interval. Dean Rader says of it, “Influenced by Japanese kanji characters and the haiku tradition, this beautiful book locates the big in the small. Magic, memory, and mutability drive these poems through fabulous places.” Her first collection, Sky = Empty won the New Issues Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the California Book Award. Born and raised in Nova Scotia, she studied art and literature in Japan for five years on fellowships from the Japanese Ministry of Culture. She edits and translates the bilingual poetry journal Eki Mae with a collective of Tokyo poets. Jacqueline Kudler’s new book of poems is Easing into Dark. David St. John says, “The power and consolations of family resonate throughout all the poems in Jacqueline Kudler’s moving and deeply reflective new collection Easing into Dark…a volume to savor again and again.” Sacred Precinct, her first full-length collection, was published by Sixteen Rivers in 2003. She received the Marin Arts Council Board Award in 2005 and the Marin Poetry Center Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010.


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5 APRIL 2012 — thursday

G.P. Skratz and Smooth Toad

Poetry Flash celebrates Everything Else, a collaborative book of poems by the late Darrell Gray and G.P. Skratz, with reading/performance by G.P. Skratz and his group Smooth Toad (Skratz, vocals/guitar; actor Bob Ernst, percussion/blues harp; and Hal Hughes, fiddle/guitar), 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)

Poet G.P. Skratz and his group Smooth Toad (Skratz, vocals/guitar; actor Bob Ernst, percussion/blues harp; and Hal Hughes, fiddle/guitar) will be celebrating the new collaborative book of poems, Everything Else, by Darrell Gray and G.P. Skratz, with drawings by Dave Morice and photographs by Shelly Vogel. The late poet Darrell Gray wrote "Actualism— Manifesto" at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1972, thus putting in motion a whirlwind of inspired nonsense that swept up at various times Whoopi Goldberg, Jack Marshall, Jim Nisbet, George Coates, and David Schein of the Blake Street Hawkeyes, Skratz, himself, and many others into paroxysms of poetry, art, music and Actualist Conventions. Andrei Codrescu says of Everything Else, "It brought back a wavelet of nostalgia and a horrible desire for coke. Go forth, my child. History's horny for us." G.P. Skratz is also the author of the book of poems Fun, the prose poem collection The Gates of Disappearance, and he was ghost writer of the Three Stooges biography, Larry, The Stooge in the Middle.


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12 APRIL 2012 — thursday

Maxine Chernoff and Rusty Morrison

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Maxine Chernoff, Without, and Rusty Morrison, After Urgency: Poems, 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 new book of poems is Without. Marjorie Perloff says of this elegiac collection, "The protagonist of these fifty brilliantly condensed elliptical poems…is never without. . .an unfailing tact—a dazzling inventiveness that distances the pain and transforms it into verbal pleasure." She is the author of six novels and nine books of poetry, including To Be Read in the Dark, The Turning, and Among the Names. She is the co-editor of the literary journal New American Writing. Rusty Morrison's new book of poems is After Urgency: Poems, winner of the Dorset Prize selected by Jane Hirshfield, who says, "The question underlying After Urgency's pages is how to go on…and each poem posits its own hard-wrestled, multiplying answer of gorgeous continuance. Rusty Morrison instantiates idea and feeling in ways unlike any other poet now writing." Morrison's first collection, Whethering, won the Colorado Prize for Poetry; her second, the true keeps calm biding its story, won the DiCastagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, was published through a Sawtooth Poetry Prize from Ahsahta Press, and went on to win a James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets and the Northern California Book Award for Poetry. She is co-publisher of Omnidawn Press out of Richmond, California.


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26 APRIL 2012 — thursday

Athena Kashyap and Arisa White

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Athena Kashyap, Crossing Black Waters, and Arisa White, Hurrah's Nest, 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)

Athena Kashyap's first book of poems is Crossing Black Waters; the late Stacy Doris says, "In Crossing Black Waters, Athena Kashyap offers us poetically sensitive, tensile works on politically sensitive, tense topics. These poems are important for their themes of rarely discussed Indian history and immigrant experience, as well as for their artistically investigative approach and awareness." She is well published in literary journals and widely anthologized in the U.S. and the U.K.
Arisa White's first book of poems is Hurrah's Nest. Tyehimba Jess says, "Arisa White's poems allow us to bear witness alongside her to the sound and vision of a family desperately searching for itself inside its wounds, afflictions and brief triumphs. It is a requiem for her loved ones, 'polished until it's opal.' So polished that it's not hard to see our own faces, our own families speaking back to us through each unflinching mirror that she holds up to herself and her kin in the guise of poetry." A Cave Canem fellow, she is the author of two chapbooks, Disposition for Shininess and Post Pardon and is also author of the recently produced play Frigidare. Her poetry is featured on the recording WORD with the Jessica Jones Quartet.


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12 MAY 2012 — saturday

Celebrating Jack Gilbert: Collected Poems

Jack Gilbert will be there in person to enjoy the celebration of his magnificent new book, Jack Gilbert: Collected Poems, with readings from his poetry by Linda Gregg, C.S. Giscombe, Joseph Stroud, Donald Brees, Bill Mayer, Larry Felson, and special surprise guests, Richard Silberg will intro, sales of the book will benefit Poetry Flash, Pegasus Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/649-1320, www.pegasusbookstore.com)

Linda Gregg's recent book is All of it Singing: New and Selected Poems. Poet W.S. Merwin praised her poems: "They are original in the way that really matters: they speak clearly of their source. They are inseparable from the surprising, unrolling, eventful, pure current of their language, and they convey at once the pain of individual loss, a steady and utterly personal radiance." C.S. Giscombe's recent book of poetry is Prairie Style. Marjorie Perloff says, "In a series of dense, aphoristic, interrelated meditations, Giscombe unearths a unique "Afro-Prairie" world of love and loss….This is a haunting and beautiful book." He teaches at University of California, Berkeley. Joseph Stroud's recent book is Of This World: New and Selected Poems." Jane Hirshfield says of it, "One of the finest collections of poems I've read in years---intelligent, sensuous, moving, full of human insight." Donald Brees is an old friend of Jack Gilbert's; they traveled together in Greece. His poems have appeared in Kindled Terraces: American Poets in Greece and Open Field: Poems from Group 18. Bill Mayer's new book is Articulate Matter. Grace Shulman says, "The best of these poems are transcendent, bringing the sacred into common life." Mayer is a professional photographer who worked with Tony Keppelman on Hummingbirds, a photographic essay. Larry Felson is the author of Salt and Silver and is one of five poets featured in the anthology Five on the Western Edge. Bill Mayer and Larry Felson are longtime members of Jack Gilbert's writing group.


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17 MAY 2012 — thursday

Nathalie Handal and Deema K. Shehabi

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Nathalie Handal, Poet in Andalucía, and Deema K. Shehabi, Thirteen Departures From the Moon, 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)

Nathalie Handal's new book of poems is Poet in Andalucía. Rattapallax Magazine says, "Poet in Andalucía—about Spain, about the Middle East, about shared destinies and hopes—touches me deeply; it reminds us of what's inconsolable, of what's multiple, of what's irreducible, and what's simultaneous." Among her other books is the poetry collection Love and Strange Horses and the anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond, which she co-edited. She is a Lannan Foundation Fellow, recipient of the Alejo Zuloaga Order, and winner of a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Book Award. Deema K. Shehabi's first book of poems is Thirteen Departures From the Moon; Naomi Shihab Nye says, "…Deema Shehabi's map is huge and deep as she weaves the threads of landscape, earth and sky, into a cloth wide enough to cover everyone. Her grandfather was the mayor of Gaza—in his light, in the light of her precious mother and her people's ongoing pain, with a stunning lyrical gift of seeing and knowing, she walks the wide world through language that redeems and blesses." She is also co-editor of the anthology Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here (poems and essays celebrating Baghdad's oldest bookselling and publishing street) to be published in June 2012.


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20 MAY 2012 — sunday

Julie Bruck and Sunnylyn Thibodeaux

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Julie Bruck, Monkey Ranch, and Sunnylyn Thibodeaux, Palm to Pine, Diesel, A Bookstore, 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, 3:00 (510/653-9965, dieselbookstore.com)

Julie Bruck's new book of poems is Monkey Ranch. Cornelius Eady says, "I have long considered Julie Bruck to be one of our most committed and humane voices. Bruck sees everything we do; she just seems to see it wiser. Her poems sing and roil with everything complicated and joyous we human monkeys are." Her other collections include The End of Travel and The Woman Downstairs. Born and raised in Montreal, she now lives in San Francisco with her family. Her honors include two Gold Canadian National Magazine Awards, grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, and two Pushcart nominations.
Sunnylyn Thibodeaux's new book of poems is Palm to Pine. Julien Poirier says, "In Palm to Pine, Sunnylyn Thibodeaux taps community as its source; the community of things present, of light and sound, of memory and imagination. These poems explore the collected senses of the day-to-day while telling the tale of another place, as if in time travel, inviting the reader to come and go with and partake in the toast." She has published a number of chapbooks, including 20/20 Yielding, Room Service Calls, and the forthcoming Against What Light. She is co-editor of Auguste Press and Lew Gallery Editions.


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24 MAY 2012 — thursday

Amanda Nadelberg, Mira Rosenthal, and Elisabeth Frost

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Amanda Nadelberg, Bright Brave Phenomena, Mira Rosenthal, The Local World, and Elisabeth Frost, All of Us, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, moesbooks.com)

Elisabeth Frost's first full-length book of poems is All of Us. Alicia Ostriker says, "In the white space out beyond Elisabeth Frost's cropped tales, subtle situations, plausible and bizarre fantasias, you may sense the ghosts of Kafka and Borges strolling. But these delicious, low-key, disturbing and always surprising prose poemsŠare a world unto themselves." She has also published the chapbook Rumor and a critical study, The Feminist Avant-garde in American Poetry. She is co-editor, as well, of Innovative Women Poets: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and Interviews. She is founder and editor of the Poets Out Loud Book Series from Fordham University Press.
Amanda Nadelberg's new book is Bright Brave Phenomena. Timothy Donnelly says, "Nadelberg's second collection offers dizzying shifts in scale and boldly propulsive logic from the stability of poems scrupulously attentive to what the aircraft industry calls 'structural integrity.'…This is a beautifully affirming book." Her first collection, Isa the Truck Named Isadore, was winner of the 2005 Slope Editions Book Prize.
Mira Rosenthal's first book of poems, The Local World, was the 2010 winner of the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize selected by Maggie Anderson, who says, "In poem after poem of The Local World, the human body and the land are at risk. What mitigates the danger is the power of language to reshape experience.…What an eye for the precise detail this poet has, and what wild music!" She is a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.


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31 MAY 2012 — thursday

Carol V. Davis and Grace Grafton

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Carol V. Davis, Between Storms, and Grace Grafton, Whimsey, Reticence and Laud, 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)

Carol V. Davis's new book of poems is Between Storms. Elaine Terranova says, "In ravishing line after line, Carol V. Davis balances between cultures, between generations, and, yes, between storms. She traces her family's odyssey back to the old world against the tide of survivors escaping from it…The voice of these poems is true and constant, finding a still, tender center in the upheaval of living." She won the 2007 T. S. Eliot Prize for a previous collection Into the Arms of Pushkin: Poems of St. Petersburg. She was a senior Fulbright scholar in Russia 1996-7 and 2005; she published It's Time to Talk About… in a bilingual collection in Russia in 1997, and had her poetry read on Radio Russia, as well on National Public Radio here in this country.
Grace Marie Grafton's new book of poems is Whimsey, Reticence and Laud, a book of sonnets each triggered by one word which serves as the title; the poem then tries to embody the spirit of the word. Her other books of poems include Other Clues, a book of prose poems, Visiting Sisters, poems inspired by artwork of contemporary women, and the chapbook Zero, winner of the Poetic Matrix Press contest. She is a coordinator of the Last Word reading series at Nefeli Café in Berkeley.


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7 JUNE 2012 — thursday

Celebrating Turning a Train of Thought Upside Down

Poetry Flash at Moe's Books celebrates Turning a Train of Thought Upside Down: An Anthology of Women's Poetry with a reading by contributors Judy Bebelaar, Lucille Lang Day, Gail Rudd Entrekin, Christina Hutchins, and Janell Moon, 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 contributors reading by five accomplished Bay Area women poets is a celebration of Turning a Train of Thought Upside Down: An Anthology of Women's Poetry, which includes forty-one San Francisco Bay Area women poets in total. Grace Cavalieri, producer of NPR's "The Poet and the Poem" says, "Forty-one women are unarmed but dangerous. They can change your life with clarity, truth and power in equal measure. These poets, from the literary culture of San Francisco, make up an album of rich fabrics combining the ordinary and the magnificent. Intimate details and heightened temperaments give us more reason to care about poetry." Judy Bebelaar directs the Writing Teachers Write reading series at Expressions Gallery in Berkeley. Lucille Lang Day's recent poetry book is The Curvature of Blue; her memoir, Married at Fourteen, is forthcoming from Heyday. Gail Rudd Entrekin's new book of poems is Rearrangement of the Invisible; she is editor of Canary, an online literary journal of the environmental crisis. Christina Hutchins is a recent Poet Laureate of the City of Albany, Caliifornia; her new book of poetry is The Stranger Dissolves. Janell Moon is Poet Laureate of Emeryville; her most recent book is Salt and Paper: 65 Candles. The anthology's editor is Andrena Zawinski, who is also an award-winning poet and educator.


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10 JUNE 2012 — sunday

Northern California Book Awards

31st 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 journalist and author Michael Pollan, Food Rules, The Omnivore's Dilemma, NCBR Recognition Award will be presented to Everything is its own reward, An All Over Coffee Collection, by Paul Madonna, 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, poetryflash.org/programs/?p=ncba_2012)


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14 JUNE 2012 — thursday

Jessica Fisher and Margaret Ronda

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Jessica Fisher and Margaret Ronda, 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)

Jessica Fisher's new book of poems is Inmost. Louise Glück says of it, "Her poems are analytic meditations, their variety and beauty manifestations of extraordinary sensitivity to English syntax." Her first book, Frail-Craft, was chosen by Louise Glück for the 2006 Yale Younger Poets Award and was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award.
Margaret Ronda's first book of poems is Personification; it was chosen for the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize by Carl Phillips, who says, "The poems of Personification fascinate—as in, bind fast—the reader with their invitation to join "a pilgrim's journey chastened by ruin…Here is a strange and arresting vision, indeed."


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17 JUNE 2012 — sunday

Michelle Bitting, Brendan Constantine, and Joseph Lease

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Michelle Bitting, Brendan Constantine, and Joseph Lease, 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)

Michelle Bitting's new book of poems is Notes to the Beloved. Dorianne Laux says, "Notes to the Beloved brims with the language of a fully lived life. A powerful female voice, body, spirit and sensibility inhabits this book and shakes it to the core. Bitting is at her best here: unbridled, open, aware." A dancer and a chef as well as a poet, she is the author of a previous book of poems, Good Friday Kiss, chosen by Thomas Lux as winner of the 2007 DeNovo First Book Award; her poem "Permeable, Smitten" won the 2011 Beyond Baroque Poetry Award First Prize.
Brendan Constantine's new book of poems is Calamity Joe. Scott Hightower says, "Calamity Joe—much like 'The Shield of Achilles'—is a convex mirror where the world is part Eden, part slum…Constantine's 'Joe' takes up where Berryman's 'Henry' left off." His two previous collections are Letters To Guns and Birthday Girl With Possum.
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 toward a new utterance." His previous collections are Broken World, Human Rights, and The Room; his poetry has been featured on NPR and anthologized by Robert Creeley in Best American Poetry.


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21 JUNE 2012 — thursday

David Alpaugh and Kathleen Lynch

Poetry Flash presents a reading by David Alpaugh and Kathleen Lynch, 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)

David Alpaugh's new poetry chapbook is Crazy Dave Talks With The Poets. His work appears widely in hard copy and on the net, and he is the monthly poetry columnist for Scene 4 Magazine. A finalist for Poet Laureate of California, he is known for his controversial essays and his satiric poems on 'Po-Biz'. His first collection, Counterpoint, won the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize from Story Line Press. His work is anthologized in California Poetry from the Gold Rush to the Present.
Kathleen Lynch's first collection, Hinge, won the Black Zinnias National Poetry Book Competition. Stephen Dunn says, "She's a poet of both gravity and charm, continually fascinated with the vagaries of what it means to be alive. I'm an unabashed Kathleen Lynch fan. She even knows how to make sadness lively." Her chapbooks include How to Build an Owl, No Spring Chicken, Alterations of Rising, and Kathleen Lynch-Greatest Hits.


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15 JULY 2012 — sunday

Alicia Suskin Ostriker and Philip Memmer

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Alicia Suskin Ostriker and Philip Memmer, 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)

Alicia Suskin Ostriker's new book of poems is The Book of Life, Selected Jewish Poems, 1979-2011. Ilya Kaminsky calls it, "A Song of Songs, which is not Solomon's but Alicia Ostriker's. A great ages-old hymn to life, to flesh, to memory, is revised again on these pages, with gusto, with passion, with clarity, with eros, with grief." An incisive critic and a major American poet, she has published fourteen books of poems including The Book of Seventy, The Mother/ Child Papers, No Heaven, the volcano sequence, and The Little Space: Poems Selected and New, 1968-1998. She has also published a number of prose books, on the Bible and on contemporary literature. Among her honors are the William Carlos Williams Award, the San Francisco State Poetry Center Award, the National Jewish Book Award; she has twice been a finalist for the National Book Award.
Philip Memmer's new book of poems is The Storehouses of the Snow. Alicia Ostriker says, "Bitter and brilliant, ardent and persistent, The Storehouses of the Snow is a book to read-no fooling-alongside the Book of Job. Every poem here made me catch my breath in astonishment at Philip Memmer's bold imagination and the sacred relentlessness of his quest." His previous three books include Lucifer A Hagiography, winner of the 2008 Idaho Prize for Poetry; Threat of Pleasure, winner of the Adirondack Literary Award for Poetry; and Sweetheart, Baby, Darling.


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19 JULY 2012 — thursday

MPC Traveling Show with Rose Black

Poetry Flash co-hosts the Marin Poetry Center Traveling Show with Rose Black, featured poets include David Alpaugh, Adrienne Amundsen, Patricia Edith, Adam David Miller, Connie Post, and Joan Stepp Smith, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com)

Rose Black, whose most recent book of poems is Winter Light, will co-host this event in the Marin Poetry Center Traveling Show with Poetry Flash, as part of the Marin Poetry Center's annual summer reading extravaganza. The Marin County-friendly, mostly East Bay poets who will read are David Alpaugh, whose recent chapbook of poems is Crazy Dave Talks With The Poets; Adrienne Amundsen is a psychologist, poet, and world traveler, her recent book of poetry is Cassandras Falling; Patricia Edith, whose work includes The Commute, an Extended Poem in XXVI Parts and the chapbook 8 Student Nurses and Other Dead Girls; Adam David Miller, author of the prose memoir Tickets to Exile and The Sky is a Page, New and Selected Poems; Connie Post, former Poet Laureate of Livermore, whose most recent chapbook is And When the Sun Drops; and Joan Stepp Smith, whose recent book of poems is In a Pasture with Palominos.


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26 JULY 2012 — thursday

Anita Barrows, Dawn McGuire, and David Shaddock

Poetry Flash presents Anita Barrows, Dawn McGuire, and David Shaddock, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com)

Anita Barrows is a poet, translator, and child psychologist. Her published works include the award-winning collection of poetry The Road Past the View and (with Joanna Macy) Rilke's Book of Hours.
Dawn McGuire's new book of poems is The Aphasia Café. Thomas Fuller says, "Dawn McGuire's aphasia poems start from the most frightening place possible—where there are no words even to convey 'I am' or 'this is'—and then stitch the pieces of a broken world together word by word, with the intelligence of a surgeon put on earth to heal and the heart of a poet showing a lover how to love." She is a neurologist and the award-winning author of two previous books of poems, Sleeping in Africa and Hands On. She was co-winner of the 2011 Sarah Lawrence/Campbell Corner Language Exchange Poetry Prize.
David Shaddock's books of poems include Dreams Are Another Set of Muscles with an introduction by Denise Levertov and In This Place Where Something Missing Lives. His play, In The Company of Seekers, will be part of this year's Spoleto Art and Music Festival in Umbria. He has received the Power of Poetry Prize for a collection of spiritual poetry and the International Peace Poem Prize. A psychotherapist, he has also published several prose books in his field.


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2 AUGUST 2012 — thursday

M.L. Liebler, Heather Bourbeau, and Eliot Schain

Poetry Flash presents M.L. Liebler, Heather Bourbeau, and Eliot Schain, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com)

M. L. Liebler's latest book of poems is Wide Awake in Someone Else's Dream, which won both a Paterson Poetry Prize and The American Indie Book Award. Colette Inez says, "M. L. Liebler brings poems of great zest, joy, and large heart to appreciative audiences worldwide. He deserves our praise. Among his many other books, he edited the Coffee House Press anthology Working Words: Punching the Clock and Kicking Out the Jams. He's read his work to international audiences in Russia, Spain, Finland, China, Italy, Germany, and elsewhere. He's the founding director of both The National Writer's Voice Project in Detroit and the Springfed Arts: Metro Detroit Writers Literary Arts Organization.
Heather Bourbeau's debut book of poems is Daily Palm Castings. Her book profiles people in often overlooked professions, the writing inspired by Lyle Lovett's "Pontiac," Wim Wenders's Wings of Desire, and the work of Studs Terkel. She was a finalist for the Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize and winner of the Pisk! Poetry Slam. She is a journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Economist and elsewhere. She was a contributing writer to The New York Times best seller Not On Our Watch: The Mission to End Genocide in Darfur and Beyond.
Eliot Schain's most recent book is Westering Angels. D. Nurkse says, "Eliot Schain is a treasure—a poet with a sharp edge and a broad canvas. Some artists have irony, some have vision; Schain has both, and tests them against each other with fire and wit." He's also author of the chapbook American Romance. His poems have been published in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere and anthologized in The Place That Inhabits Us and Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems and Poetics from California.


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5 AUGUST 2012 — sunday

Gail Rudd Entrekin, Joan Baranow and David Watts

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Gail Rudd Entrekin, Joan Baranow and David Watts, 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)

Gail Rudd Entrekin's new book of poems is Rearrangement of the Invisible. Ellen Bass says, "Gail Rudd Entrekin's Rearrangement of the Invisible is both praise and eulogy, a cherishing of the moments of our lives and a sorrow song for their passing. Through it all we feel the force of her love—for her family and for all of us…An honest, intimate, and wise book." She is also co-publisher and poetry editor of Hip Pocket Press and editor of the online literary magazine of the environment Canary.
Joan Baranow's book of poems is Living Apart. Alicia Ostriker says of it, "Like a younger and more sensuous Mary Oliver…Joan Baranow turns and returns to lyric as to a quenchless source. To listen to her music precise and rich is like overhearing the multiple hum of life and loss in a complicated natural environment." Her poetry has been widely published in literary magazines. She and her husband David Watts produced the PBS documentary Healing Words: Poetry and Medicine; they have also co-edited the prose book The Healing Art of Writing: Volume One.
David Watts has two new books, At High Altitude: 31 Poems of 31 Words, winner of a Sunken Garden Poetry Prize, and The Color of Desire, a book of short poems that "pathway into the interior consciousness," written under is nom de plume of Harvey Ellis. He also has just released a CD, The Free Radicals, of poetry and jazz. He is a gastroenterologist, author of a number of prose books on the complexity of the doctor-patient relationship, a classically trained musician, and a television producer/host.


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13 SEPTEMBER 2012 — thursday

Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Sotère Torregian

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Sotère Torregian, wheelchair accessible, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, moesbooks.com)

Maria Mazziotti Gillan's new book of poems is The Place I Call Home. Hal Sirowitz says, "Her masterful book, The Place I Call Home, is more about redeeming the past—finding grace in the details—than about nostalgia.…It's like she has created a large tapestry of her life—every thread is important. I'm man enough to admit that some of these poems made me cry." She's published fourteen books of poetry, including Italian Women in Black Dresses and What We Pass On: Collected Poems 1980-2009. The founder/Executive Director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in Paterson, New Jersey and editor of the Paterson Literary Review, her honors include a 2008 American Book Award and a Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award from Poets & Writers.
Sotère Torregian's new book of poems is On the Planet Without Visa. Anne Waldman calls him, "One of our most radically original poets." Torregian was born in Newark, of Ethiopian, Arabic, Greek, Armenian, and Moorish ancestry. Affiliated with French Surrealist poets and associated with the New York School of poets and painters, he's published eight books of poetry; he was also one of the founders of the Afro-American Studies program at Stanford University in 1969.


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20 SEPTEMBER 2012 — thursday

Ruth L. Schwartz and Ruth Thompson

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Ruth L. Schwartz and Ruth Thompson, wheelchair accessible, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, moesbooks.com)

Ruth L. Schwartz's brand new book of poetry is Miraculum. Mark Doty said, "Ruth L. Schwartz will settle for nothing less than the essential. Her passionate poems are alive to the vulnerability of the body, the daily possibility of joy, and the deep struggle not only to make sense of, but to affirm the world." Her previous book is Dear Good Naked Morning, chosen by Alicia Ostriker for the Autumn House Poetry Prize. Ostriker says, "Poem after poem here, beginning with the naked bravery of the title, caused my eyes to open wide, my breath to catch, made me shout aloud with delight at some fresh excess of insight, some dazzling flicker of truth, some spurt of living metaphor, some wild phrase of music." Schwartz has published four books of poems, each a prizewinner, including Edgewater, selected by Jane Hirshfield as a National Poetry Series Winner and Accordion Breathing and Dancing, which won the Associated Writing Programs Award. She is also author of Death in Reverse: A Love Story, her memoir of donating an organ to save the life of her lover.
Ruth Thompson’s first full-length book of poems is Woman with Crows. Philip Terman says of it, “These courageous poems journey the dark and beautiful mysteries and bravely offer, in a lyric that is fiercely wild and refreshingly independent, deeply earned wisdoms.” She is also the author of Here Along Cazenovia Creek, a chapbook cycle of poems following the seasons of a year from spring to winter. Her poems have won several prizes including the New Millennium Writings Poetry Award and the Harpur Palate Milton Kessler Memorial Prize.


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23 SEPTEMBER 2012 — sunday

Joan Aleshire, Stephanie Brown and Martha Rhodes

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

Joan Aleshire’s new book of poems is Happily. Stephen Dobyns says of it, “In these graceful, highly detailed poems, Aleshire investigates a privileged childhood and young adulthood of the 1940s and 50s, a time so different from our own as to be truly from another world.…Aleshire’s poems are as much sound as sense, and together they don’t talk so much about a vanished time as recreate it with all its many levels of actuality and gradations of emotions.”
Stephanie Brown’s latest book book of poems is Domestic Interior. Tony Hoagland says, “Stephanie Brown is one of my favorite poets. There’s something lethally, courageously blunt in her poems.…Her star is stationed somewhere in the quadrant of Sylvia Plath and Anne Carson, and it throbs with its own distinctive human brightness.” Her first collection was Allegory of the Supermarket, and her work has been anthologized in American Poetry: The Next Generation, Body Electric: Twenty-five Years of America’s Best Poetry, and in four editions of The Best American Poetry.
Martha Rhodes’s new book is The Beds. Cate Marvin says, “I can assure you that Martha Rhodes’ unflinching manner in The Beds will make you flinch…what’s so brilliant about this book is how steadfastly it refuses closure. These poems, grim and wise, never arrive in the guise of the Good Girl. And for that brand of honesty, I am most grateful.” Her previous collections are At the Gate, Perfect Disappearance, which won the Green Rose Prize, and Mother Quiet. She is Director of Four Way Books.


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29 SEPTEMBER 2012 — saturday

Watershed: Robert Hass, Joy Harjo, Michael McClure, Brenda Hillman, Francisco X. Alarcón

17th Annual Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival with 100 Thousand Poets for Change features poetry readings by Robert Hass, Joy Harjo, Brenda Hillman, Michael McClure, Francisco X. Alarcón, Rebecca Foust, with Maya Khosla, Susan Kelly-DeWitt, Kim Shuck, Maureen Hurley, Rebecca Moos, Richard Silberg; Laura Moriarty and Brent Cunningham present The Arcadia Project: Postmodern Pastoral; John Oliver Simon with K-12 students from Poetry Inside Out, River of Words, California Poets in the Schools; journalist Mark Hertsgaard, Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth; great jazz by The Barry Finnerty Trio, We are Nature Open Mic, enter the drawing for spots on site at noon; River Village exhibits for literary, environmental, and DIY mags, 'zines, organizations, wheelchair accessible, email to request ASL interpreter by September 21, near Berkeley BART, co-sponsored by Poetry Flash, Ecology Center/Berkeley Farmers' Market, and Ecocity Builders, Civic Center Park, MLK Jr. Way at Center Street, Berkeley, noon-4:30 (510/525-5476, mbb @ poetryflash.org)


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4 OCTOBER 2012 — thursday

Martha Collins and Peter Neil Carroll

Poetry Flash presents Martha Collins and Peter Neil Carroll, wheelchair accessible, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, moesbooks.com)

These two poets, in their separate ways, will be exploring American history, geography, and politics. Martha Collins's new book of poems is White Papers. Afaa Michael Weaver says, "White Papers is a praise song for the truth. It bravely pulls back the covers of whiteness to offer us precious views of racial privilege.…The rhythmic tapestry of this remarkable work helps open the door to a healing that is long overdue." Among her other books of poems is Blue Front, winner of the Anisfeld-Wolf Book Award and chosen one of "25 Books to Remember from 2006" by the New York Public Library. Among her many other honors are three Pushcart Prizes, the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, and fellowships from the NEA and the Ingram Merrill Foundation.
Peter Neil Carroll's new book of poems is A Child Turns Back to Wave: Poetry of Lost Places, winner of Prize Americana. Charlotte Muse says of it, "Peter Neil Carroll, poet and historian, has gone to see America for himself. He has traveled through desolate, mysterious western places full of the spirit of vanished peoples, and gone watching, remembering, and imagining through the heartland and the South, to bring us back…a clear-eyed, passionate record of the tragic destruction of the land, the remnants of its beauty, the stunned responses of its forgotten inhabitants." His first book of poems is Riverborne. He is also the author of Keeping Time: Memory, Nostalgia, and the Art of History and We the People: A Brief American History.


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11 OCTOBER 2012 — thursday

D. Nurkse and Richard Silberg

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Richard Silberg and D. Nurkse, wheelchair accessible, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, moesbooks.com)

D. Nurkse’s new book of poems is A Night in Brooklyn. Anne Hamilton says, “D. Nurkse…seems to be weaving poetry’s various movements toward a cohesive zenith, which takes him beyond categorization. He may be a contemporary poet, but his words will live after him.” He’s published nine previous books of poems, and his honors include an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Richard Silberg’s new book of poems is The Horses: New & Selected Poems. Tony Barnstone says, “Richard Silberg is a scat cat razzing and jazzing and boom-shika-booming down the page-stage.…These poems are timeriffs and deathrants and they are written with a profound humanity, and with a “crying so deep/ it was like coming/ bitter crying/ a crying sweet like milk.” He has published five previous collections, most recently Deconstruction of the Blues, winner of a PEN Oakland- Josephine Miles Literary Award; he’s Associate Editor of Poetry Flash.


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21 OCTOBER 2012 — sunday

Lucille Lang Day and Katherine Hastings

Poetry Flash presents a reading and book launch by Lucille Lang Day, Married at Fourteen, a memoir, and Katherine Hastings, Cloud Fire, 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)

Lucille Lang Day will be reading from her memoir Married at Fourteen: A True Story. Herbert Gold says of it, "Lucy Day's story of her life as a teenage mother and beyond is one of the great American contemporary memoirs." She is the winner of the Willow Review Award in Creative Nonfiction and a Notable Essay citation in Best American Essays. She has published eight books of poems and chapbooks, including The Curvature of Blue and Infinities. Her first poetry collection, Self-Portrait with Hand Microscope, received the Joseph Henry Jackson Award. Day is the founder and Director of the Oakland-based press Scarlet Tanager Books.
Katherine Hastings's first full-length book of poems is Cloud Fire. Gillian Conoley says, "How refreshing to come across a book like Katherine Hastings' marvelous Cloud Fire, rich and verdant in formal experiment and range. Mixing lyrics, narratives, curses, blessings, spells, and unabashed love poems, the work is hard-won and honest, generous and rigorous." She has also published two chapbooks, Fog Light and Updraft. Hastings is the host of WordTempleon NPR affiliate KRCB FM and curator of the WordTemple Poetry Series in Sonoma County.


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25 OCTOBER 2012 — thursday

Laura Mullen and Carol Snow

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Laura Mullen, Enduring Freedom: A Little Book of Mechanical Brides, and Carol Snow, Placed: Karesansui Poems, wheelchair accessible, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, moesbooks.com)

Laura Mullen's recent book of poems is Dark Archive. Fred Moten says of it, "See how veer, wander, being dragged, suffering restructuring, turn into new solids, solidarities of moving, hard-edged lyric social work in solitude, for the crowd, against loneliness, which is really, really cool." Her brand new book, to be celebrated at this event, is Enduring Freedom: A Little Book of Mechanical Brides. Her first book of poems, The Surface, was a National Poetry Series selection; subsequent collections are After I Was Dead, and Subject. Her poetry has been anthologized in American Hybrid, and among her honors are Ironwood's Stanford Prize, a Rona Jaffe Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship.
Carol Snow's latest book is Placed: Karesansui Poems. Her first book of poems, Artist and Model, was also a National Poetry Series selection, followed by For and The Seventy Prepositions. Anthologized in American Hybrid and Lyric Postmodernisms, she has been honored with the Joseph Henry Jackson Award, a Pushcart Prize, and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship.


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4 NOVEMBER 2012 — sunday

Kathleen Fraser and Laura Walker

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Kathleen Fraser, movable TYYPE, and Laura Walker, Follow-Haswed, wheelchair accessible, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org, Diesel, A Bookstore, 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, 3:00 (510/653-9965, dieselbookstore.com)

Kathleen Fraser's new book of poems is movable TYYPE. Robert Glück says, "Kathleen Fraser never takes a short cut. In movable TYYPE she asks again, What can a poem be and do?—hanging words in the sky, opening the process collectively, turning the page into an environment, an installation. Intimacy is wedded to abstraction, and form itself is only a holding place in this spinning world." She has published fourteen poetry collections and seven limited-edition artist books in collaboration with American painters. Fraser has also been a seminal influence in Bay Area poetry, a director of The Poetry Center and founder of The American Poetry Archives at San Francisco State University and co-founder and editor of HOW(ever) , a journal for innovative women poets and scholarship restoring the works of modernist women poets.
Laura Walker's new book of poems is Follow-Haswed. Kathleen Fraser says, "Laura Walker's poems take us directly to the prescient heart of poetry.…Her poems begin at Follow and pull through to Haswed, [from Vol. VI of the Oxford English Dictionary], with precarious tipping forward into found meanings.…This is an unforgettable book in the highest tradition of break-through art." Walker's previous collections are bird book, rimertown/an atlas, and swarm lure.


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15 NOVEMBER 2012 — thursday

Aby Kaupang and Matthew Cooperman

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Aby Kaupang and Matthew Cooperman, wheelchair accessible, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, moesbooks.com)

More about the readers
Aby Kaupang's new book of poems is Absence is such a Transparent House. Elizabeth Robinson says, "Aby Kaupang's poetry demonstrates the effects of passion and will as they collide with the brutalities of the world.…Brave, uncanny, and deeply felt, this book balances the delicacies of attention with the fortitude of continuing exploration." Her first collection was Scenic Fences/Houses Innumerable.
Matthew Cooperman's new book of poems is Still. Martha Ronk says of it, "A book as capacious as the 'capacious being' at its center, an anti-epic with an antic narrator demonstrating heroic ways to work and love and sing in this, our corrupt and entrapping world." His first two collections were DaZE and Sacrificial Zinc, winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize; he was a founding editor of Quarter After Eight, and he is poetry editor of Colorado Review.


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29 NOVEMBER 2012 — thursday

Kathleen Winter and Hugh Martin

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Kathleen Winter, Nostalgia for the Criminal Past, and Stegner fellow Hugh Martin, So, How Was the War? wheelchair accessible, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, moesbooks.com)

Hugh Martin is a veteran of the Iraq war; his chapbook So, How Was the War? was published in 2010, and his first full-length book, The Stick Soldiers, won the 2012 Poulin Book Prize and is forthcoming in April, 2013. James Harm says of it, "For in a world as harsh as this one, a world delimited by war, beauty is as appalling as it is necessary. Hugh Martin's great achievement is to remind us of this necessity, and to assert the power of poetry as witness and as solace." He is currently a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.
Kathleen Winter's first book of poems, Nostalgia for the Criminal Past, won the 2011 Antivenom Poetry Award from Elixir Press. Cynthia Hogue says, "By turns witty, gutsy, and passionate…[t]here is in these poems a subtle, delicate narrative of loss, grief, and survival, but as a poet trained in the law, Winter knows that any truth, like joy, is rare and precious.…These poems are the nimble, profound products of experience alchemized into wisdom."


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2 DECEMBER 2012 — sunday

Ben Bloch and Kirsten Casey

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

Ben Bloch's debut book of poems is Narrows. Stanley Moss says of it, "Ben Bloch makes poetry out of his dreams, hereness and distance, simplicity born in beautiful complications.…He may not carry the day for humanity, but he carries its flag." He works in the California prison system as a Clinical Psychologist. He also leads writing groups and facilitates an inmate-published newsletter, and his poetry recently appeared in Poetry Daily. He lives in the Monterey Bay Area, in Salinas.
Kirsten Casey's first book of poems is Ex Vivo (Out of the Living Body). Cheryl Dumesnil asks, "What could unify such a varied collection of narrators—inebriated monks, famous painters, suicides, bad girls, and a woman who feels no pain?…In this collection, the binding thread is language itself, which functions not only as an instrument of communication, but as character, as place, as metaphor, as architecture, as song." She lives in the Sierra Nevada foothills and writes a blog at outofthelivingbody.tumblr.com.


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17 JANUARY 2013 — thursday

Word Palace Press Reading

Poetry Flash presents a reading celebrating Word Palace Press with poets Michael Hannon, Lee Perron, Kevin Patrick Sullivan, Leslie St. John, Peter Dale Scott, and fiction writer Joe Riley, wheelchair accessible, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor @poetryflash.org, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, moesbooks.com)

This poetry and prose reading celebrates San Luis Obispo-based Word Palace Press, publisher of all six writers.
Michael Hannon's new collection, Who On Earth, is a selection from three letterpress chapbooks published by Jerry Reddan at Tangram in Berkeley. Sam Hamill says, "Michael Hannon's poems are full of the resonance that comes only from an understanding of silence…the kind of poems one wants to lift out of a book and into memory." Lee Perron will read from his forthcoming book of poems Celtic Light. Also an antiquarian bookman, he has published twelve chapbooks, including Psyche & Cubism. Joe Riley's new book of fiction, How Strange It Is To Be Anything At All, was praised by San Francisco Golden Gate Express as "part story, part life manual for the young and urban. It's a celebration of a very uncertain age and time in life…and commemorating existence in general." When not writing songs for garage bands in San Francisco, he is completing work on a romantic novella and a novel. Leslie St. John's new book of poems is Beauty Like A Rope. Jim Cushing says of it, "…having lost one eye in an absurd accident ("She Washed My Hair" tells the harrowing story), Leslie St. John has let the poet in her see with a unique third eye…with an accurate, compassionate, wisdom-inviting gaze." Peter Dale Scott is Professor Emeritus at UC Berkeley, and the author of Coming to Jakarta: A Poem About Terror, among many other books and articles. He will be reading from his forthcoming collection, Tilting Point. Kevin Patrick Sullivan's new book of poems is Under Such Brilliance. Dian Sousa says of it, "Kevin Patrick Sullivan wakes up every day in love with the world. He is an ecstatic descendent of Rumi, but his poems illuminate the roots of joy growing in a more difficult terrain."


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24 JANUARY 2013 — thursday

Francisco X. Alarcón and Melinda Palacio

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Francisco X. Alarcón and Melinda Palacio, wheelchair accessible, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor @poetryflash.org, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, moesbooks.com)

Francisco X. Alarcón's new book of poems is Ce Uno One: Poemas para el Nuevo Sol/Poems for the New Sun. His book poetically announces the New Sun—which the Mayans believe arrives in 2012—and he identifies as the era of the "Flower Sun" when the world's great concerns will be "the colors/ and the scents/ of flowers/ sprouting/ from nowhere/ everywhere…" He is the author of twelve books of poems, including Sonnets to Madness and Other Misfortunes and De Amor Oscuro/Of Dark Love, and a number of bilingual books for children. His many honors include the 1993 American Book Award, the 1993 PEN-Oakland Josephine Miles Award, the 1984 Chicano Literary Prize, and the Fred Cody Lifetime Achievement Award from the Northern California Book Reviewers.
Melinda Palacio's first full-length book of poems is How Fire Is A Story, Waiting. Juan Felipe Herrera says of it, "Melinda's collection has Bop and "swagger," lingo, song, denuncia, compassion and wild, unexpected turns—all the key ingredients and hard-won practices of a poet (and shaman) in command of her powers." She has also published a first novel, Ocotillo Dreams, which won the 2012 Mariposa Award for Best First Book and the 2012 PEN-Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature.


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27 JANUARY 2013 — sunday

White Pine Press 40th Anniversary Reading

Poetry Flash celebrates the fortieth anniversary of White Pine Press with readings by poets and translators Dennis Maloney, Carlota Caulfield, Mojdeh Marashi, Andrew Schelling, Richard Silberg, and Gary Young from their White Pine Press books, wheelchair accessible, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org, Diesel, A Bookstore, 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, 3:00 (510/653-9965, dieselbookstore.com)

Dennis Maloney, editor and publisher of White Pine Press, is also a poet and translator, his most recent publications are Just Enough, poems, and Tangled Hair, poems of Yosano Akiko. Dennis Maloney says of the press, "From the classic writers of Asia to contemporary voices from around the world, White Pine Press is your passport to a World of Voices. We publish literature exploring the world of ideas and cultures that make up the American mosaic and celebrate the diversity of the world."
Carlota Caulfield, author of The Mapmaker's Diary: Selected Poems.
Mojdeh Marashi, co-translator (with Chad Sweeney) of The Art of Stepping Through Time, by H. E. Sayeh.
Andrew Schelling, poet and translator, whose works include Dropping the Bow: Poems from the Sanskrit and Arapaho Songs, poems.
Richard Silberg, poet and translator, co-translator (with Clare You) of This Side of Time, poems by Ko Un.
Gary Young, author of Even So: New and Selected Poems.


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14 FEBRUARY 2013 — thursday

Valentine Reading with Brittany Perham

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Brittany Perham, wheelchair accessible, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor @poetryflash.org, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, moesbooks.com)

Brittany Perham's first book of poems is The Curiosities (Parlor Press, 2012). D.A. Powell says, "With curatorial precision and a starling's penchant for multiple threads in both song and shelter, Brittany Perham has fashioned a haven of curiosities captivating to the ear as well as the eye. These poems dream in color and sound: bright, chantant, lifting and lowering the music and the light, so that we are transported from this world into the antechambers of the heart and back again. You cannot re-enter the waking world after reading these lucid, eloquent poems and not feel forever changed." She was a Stegner Fellow 2009-2011, and is now a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University.


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