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2015 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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15 JANUARY 2015 — thursday

Curt Anderson and Gail Rudd Entrekin

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

MORE ABOUT THE READERS
Curt Anderson’s first full-length book of poems is The Occasionist. Al Young says, “In ways that dare, stun or delight, his watchful poems signal divinity. Again and again, they point to the vast outback of mysteries that occasion life-jammed moments that cry out or whisper.” His poems have appeared in Poetry, Exquisite Corpse, Barrow Street, and many other journals, and his poem “Platonic Love” was published in The Poetry Anthology, 1912-2002: Ninety Years of America’s Most Distinguished Verse.
Gail Rudd Entrekin’s latest 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.


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22 JANUARY 2015 — thursday

John Oliver Simon and David Shaddock

Poetry Flash presents a double White Violet Press book launch by poets John Oliver Simon and David Shaddock, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org, wheelchair accessible, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com)

MORE ABOUT THE READERS
David Shaddock’s new book of poems is Vernal Pool. Al Young says, “Not only do these poems touch base with crucial human struggles and issues; they bust moves, they take risks. Throughout the tender, mindful pages of Vernal Pool, spring breaks 24/7.” A poet and a psychotherapist, David Shaddock studied poetry with Denise Levertov at UC Berkeley. Among his previous books of poetry are This Place Where Something’s Missing Lives and Dreams Are Another Set of Muscles. He won the Ruah Magazine Power of Poetry Award and the International Peace Poem prize. His play, In a Company of Seekers, was performed at the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy.
John Oliver Simon’s new book of poems is Grandpa’s Syllables. Rebecca Foust says of it, “‘Some turbulent process related to language’ gave birth to this book, at once a paean to and elegy for the life force embodied in the speaker’s granddaughter and muse, Isabella. Working in 11-syllable lines, Simon trains his fierce focus on details small as a spider supping on dew and large as ‘a cathedral made of salt and bread.’” A poet, critic, and translator, he’s a contributing editor to Poetry Flash and a California Poets in the Schools poet-teacher. He’s also a National Endowment for the Arts fellow in literary translation and author of Caminante, a narrow road into the far south and Son Caminos, selected poems, published in Spanish.


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25 JANUARY 2015 — sunday

Ambush Review: Linda Norton, Sharon Coleman, Joseph Noble, more

Poetry Flash presents a celebration and reading for the Ambush Review, featuring contributors David Beckman, Sharon Coleman, Charles Entrekin, Grace Marie Grafton, Katherine Hastings, Joseph Noble, Linda Norton, and Angelo Sakkis, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org, wheelchair accessible, Diesel, A Bookstore, 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, 3:00 (510/653-9965, dieselbookstore.com)

A Celebration for Ambush Review, a literary journal based in the San Francisco Bay Area publishing poetry, including innovative and experimental poetry, short “flash” fiction, art, photography, and essays. Bob Booker and Patrick Cahill edit the journal, with striking design by Brendan Cahill. The contributors to read include:
David Beckman, author of Language Factory of the Mind (Finishing Line Press). Two of his poems were in Ambush Review #3. He was a 2012 and 2013 Pushcart Prize nominee.
Sharon Coleman co-curates the reading series Lyrics & Dirges, co-directs the Berkeley Poetry Festival, and is a Contributing Editor to Poetry Flash. Her chapbook is Half Circle (Finishing Line Press). She teaches poetry at Berkeley City College.
Charles Entrekin is the author of Listening: New & Selected Work and Red Mountain, Birmingham, Alabama, 1965, a novel.
Grace Marie Grafton’s newest book is Whimsy, Reticence and Laud, unruly sonnets (Poetic Matrix, 2012). Her book of prose poems, Other Clues, is from Latitude Press.
Katherine Hastings is Sonoma County Poet Laureate, author of Nighthawks (Spuyten Duyvil, 2014) and Cloud Fire. She is the host of “WordTemple” on NPR affiliate KRCB FM, and curator of the WordTemple Poetry Series and WordTemple Arts & Lectures.
Joseph Noble’s poetry and essays have appeared in Hambone, OR, New American Writing, Five Fingers Review, Eleven Eleven, Talisman, and other journals. His books include An Ives Set, Antiphonal Airs, and a chapbook Homage to the Gods.
Linda Norton is author of The Public Gardens: Poems and History (Pressed Wafer), a finalist for the 2012 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry.
Angelos Sakkis is co-translator, with John Sakkis, of Greek poet and multimedia artist Demosthenes Agrafiotis. His own work appeared in the first issue of Ambush Review. His collections are Memory-of and Fictional Character.


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29 JANUARY 2015 — thursday

Ellery Akers and Randall Potts

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

MORE ABOUT THE READERS
Ellery Akers’s new book of poems, Practicing the Truth, won the 2014 Autumn House Poetry Prize, selected by Alicia Suskin Ostriker, who says of it, “With the passion and determination of an abuse survivor, the exploring mind of a naturalist, and the soul energy of a language-loving poet, Akers gives us not one truth but layer on layer of overlapping truths.” A writer, artist, and naturalist, she is also the author of the previous poetry collection Knocking on the Earth and the children’s novel Sarah’s Waterfall. Her poetry has been featured on National Public Radio, and her many honors include the Poetry International Prize, the John Masefield Award, and Sierra magazine’s Nature Writing Award.
Randall Potts’s new book of poems is Trickster. Gerald Stern says of it, “I admire the clarity, the urgency, the invention, the intelligence, and the commitment of Randall Potts’s new book. A terrific book.” Previous collections by Randall Potts are Collision Center and a chapbook, Recant: (A Revision). A volunteer at a wildlife rehabilitation hospital, he has worked on and written about oil spill responses, some of which material appears in Trickster. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Antioch Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Five Fingers Review, Iowa Review, Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche, The West Marin Review, Poetry Flash, and other publications.


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5 FEBRUARY 2015 — thursday

Jack and Adelle Foley, Clara Hsu

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading celebrating new books by Jack and Adelle Foley, Clara Hsu, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org, wheelchair accessible, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com)

Jack Foley will celebrate two new books of poems, EYES, his selected poems, about which Michael McClure has said, "Foley is our firebrand experimentalist and he holds his torch high so the reader can have more light," and LIFE. He has published thirteen books of poetry and Visions and Affiliations, a 1,300-page "chronoencyclopedia" of California poetry from 1940 to 2005. He is a contributing editor of Poetry Flash and host of the radio show Cover to Cover on KPFA. He and Clara Hsu are co-publishers of Poetry Hotel Press.
Adelle Foley is a haiku poet and an arts activist. Along the Bloodline is her first full-length book of poems, and her work is widely published in various journals.
Clara Hsu's new book of poems is The First to Escape, edited and with an introduction by Jack Foley. A musician and translator as well as a poet, she is the author of the book of poems Mystique, honorable mention at the 2010 San Francisco Book Festival, and Babouche Impromptu and Other Moroccan Sketches, a book of short stories. She is part of the performance ensemble "Lunation," which combines Chinese and original poetry with traditional Asian instruments.


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8 FEBRUARY 2015 — sunday

Richard Michael Levine and Marilyn Stablein

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

Catch and Other Poems is Richard Michael Levine's first book of poems. Dean Young says, "Catch and Other Poems…forcefully reminds us that the first and foremost power of imagination is to see. Vividly looking backward or forward, or brilliantly in the present, these poems plunge us into the stuff of life with clarity, depth of feeling and pizzazz." He has written articles for many national publications, such as Harper's, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, and Esquire. A former professor at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, he's the author of a bestselling true crime book, Bad Blood: A Family Murder in Marin County and the short story collection, The Man Who Gave Away His Organs.
Marilyn Stablein's Splitting Hard Ground: New Poems won the New Mexico Book Award and the National Federation of Press Woman Award. Pierre Delattre says, "In her previous writing she guided us to the burning ghats, to observe the offerings of others. Now this poet of power and compassion moves us to that holy ground again. Carrying the spirit of her son on her back, she makes an offering for us all." She is also a widely exhibited visual artist. After seven years in the Himalayas in the post-Beat 1960s she wrote the memoir Sleeping in Caves, The Census Taker Travelers Tales, and Night Travels to Tibet, a sequence of prose poems based on dreams.


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22 FEBRUARY 2015 — sunday

Marilyn Chin and Jana Harris

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

Marilyn Chin's new book of poems is Hard Love Province. Joy Harjo says of it, "In these poem-songs counterparts make a counterpoint of sorrow and glee. It's all happening here in this book. Chin's most inspired and inspiring collection yet." Born in Hong Kong and raised in Portland, Oregon, her poetry invents unforgettable voices and forms of Pacific Rim assimilation and resistance. Marilyn Chin has published three previous full-length collections of poetry—Dwarf Bamboo; The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty; and Rhapsody in Plain Yellow. Among her honors are a PEN/Josephine Miles Award, five Pushcart Prizes, and fellowships for the United States Artists Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
Jana Harris's new book is You Haven't Asked About My Wedding or What I Wore: Poems of Courtship on the American Frontier. Based on thirty years of primary research of nineteenth-century frontier women, the poet Jana Harris uses her compelling poetry to resurrect a forgotten history. Louise Bernikow says, "A marvel of storytelling and a totally unique way of breathing life into stuffy archives, making women's lives hum, with its acute sense of place and language. It's a thrilling, daring work." Jana Harris teaches creative writing at the University of Washington and at the Writer's Workshop in Seattle. She is the editor of Switched-on Gutenberg and the author, most recently, of Horses Never Lie about Love.


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26 FEBRUARY 2015 — thursday

Chana Bloch and Rusty Morrison

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

Chana Bloch will read from Swimming in the Rain: New and Selected Poems 1980-2015. Henri Cole says of her new poems, "Chana Bloch is writing the best poems of her life… [She] is like a Japanese potter mending the cracked and dinged pottery of experience with gold powder sprinkled from her fingers." She is co-translator of The Song of Songs and of the poets Yehuda Amichai and Dalia Ravikovitch. Among her honors are two Pushcart Prizes, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, and the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America.
Rusty Morrison's latest book of poems is Beyond the Chainlink. Lisa Robertson says, "How do we continue to choose, speak and interpret given the weight of the end fact? Silence in Morrison's new work is transformed from an absence to a concept, a potential translator of temporal givens; she tends silence's conscious work with a measure and a subtle ear." Her previous collections have been prize-winners: the true keeps calm biding its story won Ahsahta Press's Sawtooth Prize, the Academy of American Poets James Laughlin Award, Northern California Book Award, and the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America. After Urgency won the Dorset Prize from Tupelo Press, and Whethering won the Colorado Prize for Poetry. She is co-publisher of Omnidawn Press.


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5 MARCH 2015 — thursday

J. David Cummings and Esther Kamkar

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

J. David Cummings's debut collection, Tancho, won the 2013 Snyder Award from Ashland Poetry Press, selected by Alicia Suskin Ostriker, who says, "This is a book that needed to be written and needs to be read. Its account of terrible beauty is itself beautiful, speaking of 'hope and despair, the promise of each to other.' Nagasaki, Hiroshima, 'ruined human beings,' a peace park, a sounding bell, a thousand paper cranes." J. David Cummings resigned his position as a theoretical physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1973 and vowed to end his work in nuclear weapons. He visited Japan in the early 1990s and visited the Hiroshima Memorial Peace Park. Tancho, his book-length meditation on the U.S. nuclear bombing of Japan, whose composition took him almost two decades, is the result.
Esther Kamkar has published two collections of poetry, Hummingbird Conditions, a letterpress limited edition, and the chapbook A Leopard in My Pocket. John Waterman says, "Esther Kamkar's poetry is as changing as the ocean, as passionate as a pomegranate tree in blossom, as deep and clear as a pool in a mountain stream." Born in Tehran, Iran, she has lived in the USA since 1973. Published in many literary journals, her poetry has been anthologized in The Forbidden: Poems from Iran and its Exiles and Let Me Tell You Where I've Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora.


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12 MARCH 2015 — thursday

Victoria Chang and David Roderick

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

Victoria Chang's recent book of poems is The Boss, from McSweeney's. G. C. Waldrep says, "Part meditation on corporate life, part exploration of mother- and daughterhood, part elegy for a father who has not yet died, The Boss is essential reading for anyone who has ever had a job, a child, a parent, or a heart." Her previous collections include Circle, winner of the 2005 Crab Orchard Open Competition, and Salvinia Molesta. She works in business and lives with her family in Southern California.
David Roderick's new book of poems is The Americans. Natasha Trethewey says, "The Americans is a compelling meditation on the ways we go about our lives at this cultural moment, often unmoored from the facts of history, though we drift along its shores…The poet asks: 'Must nostalgia/ walk like a prince through all our rooms?' This lovely collection shows us a way to confront that question within ourselves." A former Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford University, he is also the author of a debut collection, Blue Colonial, winner of the APR/Honickman Prize.


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19 MARCH 2015 — thursday

Cammy Thomas and Bill Mayer

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

Bill Mayer's most recent book of poems is Articulate Matter. Grace Schulman says of it, "The best of these poems are transcendent, bringing the sacred into common life…I like, too, the tone. This work is genuine." He has published three previous collections, including The Uncertainty Principle, and a fifth, A Truce With Fantasy, is forthcoming. He is also a professional photographer, who collaborated on a photographic essay, Hummingbirds, with Tony Keppelman, published by Little Brown, and he is editor and publisher of Paroikia Press.
Cammy Thomas's new book of poems is Inscriptions. Daniel Tobin says, "The poems of Cammy Thomas's second collection, Inscriptions, have an emotional ferocity and lyric intensity that cut to the quick of desolating loss and fraught family legacies…The implacable balm Thomas offers, and the mercy, is her refusal to look away." She is the author of a first collection, Cathedral of Wish, recipient of the 2006 Norma Farber First Book Prize, selected by Medbh McGuckian.


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22 MARCH 2015 — sunday

Rob Lipton and Willa Schneberg

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

Willa Schneberg's new book of poems is Rending the Garment. Philip Schultz says, "Rending the Garment tells a familiar tale, the Jewish immigrant family romance, but with an important difference: using shifting points of view and narrative interruptions…not to mention a cast of characters lively as a borscht belt revue…A fresh, original and moving addition to our literature." She has published four previous collections, including In The Margins of The World, winner of the Oregon Book Award in Poetry, and the letterpress chapbook The Books of Esther, published in conjunction with her interdisciplinary exhibit at the Oregon Jewish Museum in fall 2012. She has read at the Library of Congress, and her poems have been presented on Garrison Keillor's radio show, The Writer's Almanac.


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2 APRIL 2015 — thursday

Anita Barrows and Lenore Weiss

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

Anita Barrow's new book of poems is Exile. Joanna Macy says of it, "While they appear first as haunting fragments of an uprooted life, there is wholeness to these poems as they compose…In the tides of the displaced and dispossessed—be they called refugees, migrants, asylum seekers—their inner experience is honored here with tact and restraint, unencumbered with political reportage or sentimentality." Her previous books of poems were publications in competitions by the Quarterly Review of Literature and Riverstone Press. She has co-translated several books of Rilke's poetry with Joanna Macy, of which Book of Hours was nominated for a PEN Translation Prize.
Lenore Weiss's new book of poems is Two Places. Sharon Doubiago says, "Lenore Weiss's psychic linguistic engagement borders on the surreal, on the transcendent, the mystical, the magical, and on the mundane and familiar." Her previous collections include Cutting Down the Last Tree on Easter Island and the chapbook Tap Dancing on the Silverado Trail. She was a finalist in the California Voices contest from Poets & Writers and a finalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize from Nimrod. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2012.


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16 APRIL 2015 — thursday

Jeanne Foster and Paul Breslin

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

Poetry Flash is pleased to host the book launch for Jeanne Foster's brand new book of poems, Goodbye, Silver Sister. Richard Tillinghast says, "Jeanne Foster is a poet of great originality, writing in a way that makes a reader feel he is entering deep into what Yeats called "the labyrinth of another's being." …Foster's poems are, in addition, transgressive, hinting at forbidden areas of life in a very Southern, very New Orleansian way—if there is such a word." Her first collection, A Blessing of Safe Travel, won the Quarterly Review of Literature Poetry Award. Her critical work, A Music of Grace, explores the sacred in contemporary poetry; she is co-editor of Appetite: Food as Metaphor, an anthology of poems by women; and she is also collaborating with Alan Williamson on a translation of the poems of Bianca Tarozzi from the Italian.
Paul Breslin's new book of poems is Between My Eye and the Light. Sandra M. Gilbert says, "Paul Breslin's accomplished new collection culminates in a dazzling display of abecedarian verve. Leading up to that triumph are poems witty and contemplative, fierce and forlorn—all captivating!" His previous collection is You Are Here. He is also author of the critical books The Psycho-Political Muse: American Poetry Since the Fifties and Nobody's Nation: Reading Derek Walcott. His co-translation of Aimé Césaire, The Tragedy of King Christophe, appeared in 2013.


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23 APRIL 2015 — thursday

Lola Haskins and Lynne Knight

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

Lola Haskins's recent book of poems is The Grace to Leave. W.S. Merwin says of it, "She writes with the startling freedom and grace of a kite flying, and with the variety and assurance of invention that reveal, in image after image, the dream behind the waking world." She has published nine books of poetry, including Still the Mountain and The Rim Benders. Among her honors are two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, an Iowa Poetry Prize, and the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America. 


Lynne Knight's most recent book of poems is Again; she's published four books of poems in all, and four chapbooks. She's received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, won the Prix de l'Alliance Française 2006, a Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, the RATTLE Poetry Prize, and she's appeared in Best American Poetry. Her translation, with the author, of Ito Naga's Je sais, I Know appeared in 2013.


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26 APRIL 2015 — sunday

John Shoptaw and Daniel Wolff

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

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


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7 MAY 2015 — thursday

Stephen Kessler and Mong-Lan

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

Stephen Kessler is a poet, translator, prose-writer, and editor. He will read from his new book of poems, Where Was I?, and also launch his new translation of the Spanish poet Luis Cernuda. Jack Marshall says of Where Was I?, "These vivid impressions are recreated, in Kessler's compressed and flowing prose, as a kind of portable magic our past lives weave in us, and that magic transforms the present in which we 'relive what we missed the first time.'" Forbidden Pleasures: New Selected Poems [1924-1949] is the title of the new translation of Luis Cernuda, one of the poets of Spain's famous Generation of '27. Recent books of Kessler's include Scratch Pegasus, poems; Poems of Consummation, by the Vicente Aleixandre, translation; The Tolstoy of the Zulus: On Culture, Arts & Letters; and the novel The Mental Traveler.
Mong-Lan is a Vietnamese-born multi-disciplinary artist, poet, painter, photographer, composer, instrumentalist, singer, dancer, and teacher of Argentine tango. Her new book of poems is One Thousand Minds Brimming: poems & art; David Shapiro says, "…I praise these poems of praise which collapse distance and makes us feel, as O'Hara seemed to say, poetry is just a telephone call away." Among her collections are Song of the Cicadas, which won the Juniper Prize, a number of books touching on tango, one bilingual in English and Spanish, and Force of the Heart: Tango, Art, which includes drawings, paintings, and a tango-inspired poem. She's a former Wallace E. Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and her poems have been anthologized in Best American Poetry and The Pushcart Book of Poetry: Best Poems from 30 Years of the Pushcart Prize.


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21 MAY 2015 — thursday

Lisa Sewell and Emily Wolahan

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

Lisa Sewell's new book of poems is Impossible Object, winner of the 2014 Tenth Gate Prize. Linda Gregerson says, "These poems are urgent; they are fresh; they acknowledge no divisions in the world…And this is the Impossible Object espoused in each and every line: connection in its purest form." Lisa Sewell's previous books include The Way Out and Name Withheld, as well as the chapbook Long Corridor, winner of the 2009 Keystone Chapbook Award. She is co-editor with Claudia Rankine of two anthologies, American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics and Eleven More American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Poetics Across North America. Among her honors are grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.
Emily Wolahan's debut collection is Hinge. Timothy Donnelly says, "Hinge is a book fixated on contingency and what it might mean to live in it.…This awareness walks hand in hand with Wolahan's almost preternatural sensitivity to cause and effect, the syntax of the physical and the interplay of the parts that make up any given whole. More than any younger poet I can think of, Wolahan is attuned to the engineering of the world she walks through as well as to the musical possibilities it suggests.…" Her essays have been published widely; she's Editor and co-founder of Jerry magazine, and she has collaborated with artist Joshua Thomson on his multi-media project "Platinum Metres."


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24 MAY 2015 — sunday

Richard Newman and Lee Rossi

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

Richard Newman's new book of poems is All the Wasted Beauty of the World. George Bilgere says of it, "Newman's poems with their formal, lapidary precision, their indelible portraits of life in the cheap bars, back alleys, and rough-hewn edges of the Midwest, surprise a hunger in us for a language larger, wilder, and unabashedly loftier than daily speech." His two previous collections are Domestic Fugues and Borrowed Towns. His poetry has been widely recognized, on Garrison Keillor's radio program Writer's Almanac, in the Best American Poetry anthology, and elsewhere. He lives in St. Louis where he reviews books for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, edits River Styx literary journal, and plays in a band, The Charflies.
Lee Rossi's most recent book of poems is Wheelchair Samurai. Ruth Schwartz says, "These poems are scintillant with wit, shot through with sudden revelations and the startling, brief gleam of compassion and truth. Like the crowd gathered around a suicide in 'Almost Icarus,' Rossi keeps us, his readers, 'straining for a glimpse of that body / its imperfect beauty as fragile as our own." Among his previous collections is Ghost Diary. A staff reviewer and interviewer for the online magazine Pedestal, his poetry, reviews, and interviews have appeared widely, in Poetry Flash, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry East, Chelsea, and elsewhere.


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28 MAY 2015 — thursday

Barbara Swift Brauer, Rafaella Del Bourgo, Connie Post, more

Poetry Flash presents an installment of the Marin Poetry Center’s Traveling Show featuring poets Barbara Swift Brauer, Rafaella Del Bourgo, Connie Post, Ann Robinson, and Jeanne Wagner, co-hosted by Rose Black and Richard Silberg, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org, wheelchair accessible, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com)

Barbara Swift Brauer is a freelance writer and editor whose work has appeared in Nimrod, Canary, Anderbo, West Marin Review, The MacGuffin, Spillway, California Quarterly, and Barnabe Mountain Review, as well as anthologies, including Beside the Sleeping Maiden and The Place That Inhabits Us. With portrait artist Jackie Kirk, she is coauthor of the nonfiction book Witness: The Artist’s Vision in The Face of AIDSAt Ease in the Borrowed World, Sixteen Rivers Press.
Rafaella Del Bourgo's poems have been widely published. Awards include the 2003 Lullwater Prize and the 2010 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award, the 2012 Paumanok Prize and 2014 New Millennium Prize. She has been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize. Her chapbook is Inexplicable Business, Finishing Line Press.
Connie Post was Poet Laureate of Livermore from 2005 to 2009. Her work has appeared in Calyx, Spoon River Poetry Review, Crab Creek Review, Slipstream, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. She won the 2009 Caesura Poetry Award. Her first full-length book, Floodwater, won the Lyrebird Award.
Ann Robinson is retired from the Marin County Superior Courts; she currently owns a farming operation in Arkansas. Her work has appeared in Atlanta Review, Connecticut Review, Fourteen Hills, Natural Bridge, Nimrod, Poet Lore, Serving House Journal, Spoon River, and Valparaiso, among other journals. She has received a Marin Arts Council grant.
Jeanne Wagner is the winner of the 2014 Hayden’s Ferry 500/500 Prize and 2014 Sow’s Ear Poetry Review Award. Her poems have appeared in Cincinnati Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, Southern Poetry Review, and American Life in Poetry. She is on the editorial board of California Quarterly. Her most recent book, In the Body of Our Lives, is from Sixteen Rivers Press.


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11 JUNE 2015 — thursday

Francisco X. Alarcón and Devreaux Baker

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

Francisco X. Alarcón's new book of poems is Borderless Butterflies/Mariposas sin fronteras. Dorianne Laux says, "Francisco Alarcón's newest book is a silken thread strung with poems that bump up against one another, creating tremors of electricity, a litany of the brown peoples and poets of the Americas, dedications to those who have fought and are still fighting for justice and peace." As in this book, much of his writing is bilingual, in both English and Spanish, and on occasion trilingual, including Nahuatl, language of the Aztecs. He has authored at least twelve books of poetry, including Canto hondo/Deep Song, From the Other Side of the Night/Del otro lado de la noche: New and Selected Poems, and Body in Flames. He was honored with the Northern California Book Awards' Fred Cody Award for lifetime achievement and service and is also the award-winning author of six bilingual books of poems for children.
Devreaux Baker's new book of poems is out of the bones of the earth. Pamela Uschuk says, "…out of the bones of the earth is a fiery mélange of longing and grief, of body scars and scars from wars leavened by dreams, the balm of the natural world, and love…Anchoring her poems, evocative imagery links great issues like climate change and disease with war…Baker's is a powerful voice, a wise voice. Listen closely." She has published three previous collections, including Red Willow People, winner of a PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Poetry Award. Other honors include the 2014 Barbara Mandigo Kelley Poetry Peace Prize from the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and the Women's Global Leadership Poetry Prize. She also directed the Mendocino Coast Poets Reading Series.


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14 JUNE 2015 — sunday

Andrea Hollander, Chana Bloch, Danusha Laméris

Poetry Flash presents a celebration for Autumn House Press, featuring a reading by poets Chana Bloch, Andrea Hollander, and Danusha Laméris, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org, wheelchair accessible, Diesel, A Bookstore, 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, 3:00 (510/653-9965, dieselbookstore.com)

This reading is a celebration of three new books from Autumn House Press.
Chana Bloch’s Swimming in the Rain is a new and selected poems, 1980-2015. Henri Cole says, “Chana Bloch is writing the best poems of her life…[She] is like a Japanese potter mending the cracked and dinged pottery of experience with gold powder sprinkled from her fingers.” Selections from her four previous books, Secrets of the Tribe, The Past keeps Changing, Mrs. Dumpty, and Blood Honey are here along with a generous group of new poems. She is also an eminent translator of Hebrew poetry, including The Song of Songs and works of Yehuda Amichai and Dalia Ravikovitch.
Andrea Hollander was born in Germany to American parents and raised in the U.S. Her collections include House without a Dreamer, winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry prize, The Other Life, Woman in the Painting, and Landscape with a Female Figure: New and Selected Poems, 1982-2012. Among her honors are two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the D. H. Lawrence Fellowship, and a Pushcart Prize in prose memoir.
Danusha Laméris’s first book of poems is The Moons of August. Dorianne Laux says, “This book of motherhood, memory, and elegiac urgency crosses borders, cultures, and languages to bring us the good news of being alive. With language clear as water and rich as blood, The Moons of August offers a human communion we can all believe in.” Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts to a Dutch father and a mother from Barbados, she lived briefly in Beirut during the civil war in Lebanon but was principally raised in Mill Valley and Berkeley. After studying painting at UCSC, she has dedicated herself to poetry.


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18 JUNE 2015 — thursday

Ivan Argüelles and Neeli Cherkovski

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

Ivan Argüelles's new book of poems is Duo Poemata: Ilion–a Transcription & Altertumswissenschaft. Jack Foley says of it, "…the 'marvelous' of these poems ventures further than even Surrealism. Their vast reach and their vast reading include the Classics and the realm of Pound's Cantos, where the dead and the living mingle. James Joyce's 'nighttown' is here as well…" He has published many previous collections, including Looking for Mary Lou, which won the Poetry Society of America's William Carlos Williams Award in 1989; The Death of Stalin: Selected Early Poems, which won the Before Columbus Foundation's American Book Award in 2010; a number of 'epic', book-length poems like "That" Goddess; and A Day in the Sun, an elegiac collection prompted by the death in 2011 of his twin brother José Argüelles, the renowned New Age writer.
Neeli Cherkovski's new book of poems is The Crow and I. Raymond Foye says of him, "He celebrate[s] a love and learning in language that is exuberant, vivid, and reflective. Neeli lives for poetry. Long may this great imagination thrive." His previous collections include Leaning Against Time, From the Canyon Outward, and Animal. He is also the author of the prose works Whitman's Wild Children, Bukowski: A Life, and Ferlinghetti: A Biography. His honors include a PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles National Award for literary excellence and a 2014 Acker Award for poetry and biography.


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9 JULY 2015 — thursday

Andy Clausen, Bruce Isaacson, and Pamela Twining

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

Andy Clausen's latest book of poems is Home of the Blues: More Selected Poems. Bob Holman says, "There's an arc of power around these poems. Andy Clausen would be my choice for poet you'd most like to be shipwrecked on a desert island with, no doubt. And not just because his is the Voice Most Likely To Reach Ships Passing Within A Couple Hundred Light Years." Oakland-raised, Clausen co-edited Poems for the Nation with Allen Ginsberg and Eliot Katz, and was an editor at Long Shot magazine. He's traveled the world, done many jobs, and written of his friendships with Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Ray Bremser, Janine Pommy Vega, and others of the Beat generation.
Bruce Isaacson was one of the key voices and pioneering organizers of Spoken Word in the Bay Area. His recent books include Dumbstruck at the Lights in the Sky, Ghosts Among the Neon, and Bad Dog Blues. Jack Hirschman says, "In a world in which both [the U.S, and Russia] are now utterly capitalized, he gives his realist and inciteful eyes to seeing and revealing how poetry remains the king of affirmation amid devastating negations and the ghosting of the soul." Bruce Isaacson is publisher and editor of Zeitgeist Press, now based in Las Vegas.
Pamela Twining has published several chapbooks, including Utopians & Madmen, I Have Been a River, and A Thousand Years of Wanting. She has also published in literary journals like Big Scream and Maintenant: A Journal of Contemporary Dada Writing & Art.


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19 JULY 2015 — sunday

Susan Browne, Catharine Clark-Sayles, Roy Mash, more

Poetry Flash presents an installment of the Marin Poetry Center's Traveling Show featuring poets Susan Browne, Catharine Clark-Sayles, Susan Cohen, Roy Mash, Robert Aquinas McNally, and Robert Sward, co-hosted by Rose Black and Richard Silberg, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org, Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, 3:00 (510/649-1320, www.pegasusbookstore.com)

Susan Browne's poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Subtropics, The Mississippi Review, and on Garrison Keillor's radio show The Writer's Almanac. She is the author of Buddha's Dogs and Zephyr, and a word/music CD with poet Kim Addonizio, Swearing, Smoking, Drinking, & Kissing (cdbaby.com). Website: www.susanmariebrowne.com.
Catharine Clark-Sayles lives in Northern California and practices geriatric medicine. She has two books of poetry, One Breath and Lifeboat, and numerous poems published in medical anthologies and journals. Recent publications include Spillway, Pirene's Fountain, Locuspoint.org, The Healing Muse, The Midwestern Quarterly, and The Healing Art of Writing vol. 1 and 2.
Susan Cohen is the author of Throat Singing and recent poems in many journals and anthologies, including the Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry. Her second full-length collection has been a finalist for the Philip Levine prize, May Swenson award, Richard Snyder and Melissa Lanitis Gregory Prizes, and is seeking a publisher. She lives in Berkeley.
Roy Mash is a long time board member of Marin Poetry Center. His poems have appeared in AGNI Online, Atlanta Review, Barrow Street, The Evansville Review, Nimrod, Passages North, Poetry East, RHINO, and River Styx among others. His first full-length book is Buyer's Remorse.
Robert Aquinas McNally has published nine nonfiction books, with a tenth on the way, four chapbooks, and the full-length Simply to Know Its Name, winner of the Grayson Books Poetry Prize. His poems have graced a long list of anthologies and journals, and they have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize five times.
Robert Sward is a Guggenheim Fellow chosen by Lucille Clifton to receive a Villa Montalvo Literary Arts Award. His more than twenty books include Four Incarnations, Rosicrucian in the Basement, The Collected Poems, and God is in the Cracks, now in its second printing. His most recent collection, New & Selected Poems, 1957-2012, is from Red Hen Press. He lives in Santa Cruz.


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2 AUGUST 2015 — sunday

Sandra M. Gilbert, Sharon Doubiago, Paul Fericano, more

Poetry Flash presents a celebration for Corners of the Mouth: A Celebration of Thirty Years at the Annual San Luis Obispo Poetry Festival featuring Editors Kevin Patrick Sullivan and Patti Sullivan, who will also read at the event, with a reading by contributing poets Jasmine Marshall Armstrong, Sharon Doubiago, Paul Fericano, Sandra M. Gilbert, Valentina Gnup, Klipschutz, Brenda Nasio, Sam Pereira, Lee Rossi, Viola Weinberg, Nellie Wong, and R. Yurman, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org, wheelchair accessible, Diesel, A Bookstore, 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, 3:00 (510/653-9965, dieselbookstore.com)

This reading celebrates Corners of the Mouth: A Celebration of Thirty Years at the Annual San Luis Obispo Poetry Festival, edited by Kevin Patrick Sullivan and Patti Sullivan. The editors will read from their own work and talk about the anthology and their thirty years with the San Luis Obispo Poetry Festival. Founded in 1984, the festival continues to the present day, showcasing the best poets of the Central Coast, along with many other fine poets from all over California. The contributing poets who will read from their work in the anthology will be:
Jasmine Marshall Armstrong is a native of the Central Coast. She's published poetry in Sojourner magazine, Solo Café, Monkey Puzzle, and elsewhere. Her poem "The Custodian's Daughter" was chosen by Philip Levine as runner up in the American Academy of Poets Introduction to Journals Award.
Sharon Doubiago's new book of poems is The Visit. Among her many other publications are the poetry collections South America Mi Hija, Body and Soul, and the two-volume prose memoir My Father's Love.
Paul Fericano is a satirist and a social activist as well as a poet. His books of poems include Commercial Break and Cancer Quiz.
Sandra M. Gilbert is a leading feminist critic, co-author of the influential The Madwoman in the Attic. Newest of her many books of poems is Aftermath.
Valentina Gnup has been widely published in literary magazines, including Nimrod and Crab Orchard Review. Among her honors is the Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Award from the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.
Klipschutz is a poet, songwriter and freelance journalist. Among his books of poems are Twilight of the Male Ego and The Drawn and Quartered Moon.
Brenda Nasio is a poet and writer. She has been Assistant Fiction and Poetry Editor for Mademoiselle and a member of the editorial staff for The Paris Review.
Sam Pereira lives in the central San Joaquin Valley. His latest collection, Dusting on Sunday, was published in 2012.
Lee Rossi edited the L.A.-based magazine Tsunami. Among his books of poems is Wheelchair Samurai.
Viola Weinberg was the first Poet Laureate of Sacramento, California (2000-2002). Among her books of poems is Letters to Pablo Neruda.
Nellie Wong's newest book of poems is Breakfast Lunch Dinner. Two of her poems are engraved in public places in San Francisco, where she lives.
R. Yurman is the author of the book of poems Giraffe. He's widely published in literary journals.


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6 AUGUST 2015 — thursday

Marc Elihu Hofstadter and Daniel Marlin

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

Marc Elihu Hofstadter’s new book of poems is Memories I’ve Forgotten. He’s published five previous collections, including Shark’s Tooth, Luck, and Rising at 5 AM. Also a translator and an essayist, he’s published work in more than sixty magazines, and his essays are collected in Healing the Split.
Daniel Marlin is the author of Isaiah at the Wall, Palestine Poems, Amagasaki Sketchbook, a graphic diary of a long stay in Japan, and Heart of Ardor, a retrospective of four decades of paintings and commentary. He is co-editor of Rear Entrance to the Holy Land, Selected Writings by Mitchell Zeftel.


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17 SEPTEMBER 2015 — thursday

Rose Black and Shelley Savren

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

Rose Black's newest book of poems is Green Field. David St. John says, "Rose Black's superb collection of poems, Green Field, is a sobering volume of recollections, reflections and meditations upon a life's ravaged hopes, the echoes of a personal past, and the raw realities of our present." Her first two collections, Clearing and Winter Light, are included in Yale University's Beinecke Library Collection of American Literature. She has been editor of the Marin Poetry Center Anthology, and teaches poetry at Salinas Valley State Prison, which has inspired some of the poems she'll be reading.
Shelley Savren's new book of poems is The Wild Shine of Oranges. Dorianne Laux says, "These frank, tightly-crafted narratives recount the sounds of protest and are testament to lives lost and shared, where, in moments of mercy, 'there are no shadows.'" Her first book of poems is The Common Fire. She has taught workshops for homeless, abused, neglected and emotionally disturbed youths, developmentally disturbed adults, at juvenile halls, at a maximum security men's prison, and for every grade through California Poets in the Schools.


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4 OCTOBER 2015 — sunday

Steve Kowit Tribute: Jack Marshall, Alan Williamson, more

Poetry Flash presents tribute reading from the work of the late poet Steve Kowit by Jack Marshall, Alan Williamson, Richard Silberg, Joyce Jenkins, Dennis Schmitz, David Shaddock, and artist Lenny Silverberg, celebrating the posthumous publication of two new books on and by Steve Kowit, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org, wheelchair accessible, Diesel, A Bookstore, 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, 3:00 (510/653-9965, dieselbookstore.com)


MORE ABOUT THE READERS
The readers who will be reading Kowit’s poems to remember and celebrate this passionate, generous, and divinely funny man will be:
Joyce Jenkins, poet and Editor/Executive Director of Poetry Flash, editor of The Dumbbell Nebula.
Jack Marshall, poet and memoirist, whose most recent book of poems is Spiral Trace.
Peter Najarian, novelist and painter, whose most recent books are The Paintings of Art Pinajian and The Artist and His Mother.
Dennis Schmitz, poet, whose most recent book of poems, Animism, was a nominee for the Northern California Book Award.
David Shaddock, poet and psychotherapist, whose most recent book of poems is Vernal Pool.
Richard Silberg, poet, translator, and Associate Editor of Poetry Flash, whose most recent book is The Horses, New and Selected Poems.
Lenny Silverberg, painter, teacher, and collaborator with Steve Kowit on several books.
Alan Williamson, poet, critic, and translator, whose most recent book is The Pattern More Complicated: New and Selected Poems.


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8 OCTOBER 2015 — thursday

Stella Beratlis and Christina Hutchins

Poetry Flash presents a book launch for Christina Hutchins's Tender the Maker, with a reading by Stella Beratlis, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org, wheelchair accessible, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com)

Stella Beratlis's debut book of poems is Alkali Sink. Lee Herrick says, "Stella Beratlis writes unforgettable poems that stir inside you long after you've finished reading them. Alkali Sink is simultaneously domestic and wild, urban and rural, full of surprises and wisdom." She's widely published in literary journals, including Quercus, California Quarterly, Penumbra, and elsewhere, and she's anthologized in The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems from the San Francisco Bay Watershed, whose title comes from one of her poems. She's also co-editor of More Than Soil, More Than Sky: The Modesto Poets.
Christina Hutchins's new book of poems, to be launched at this event, is Tender the Maker, winner of the May Swenson Award. Cynthia Hogue, judge for the award, says, "Again and again in Christina Hutchin's Tender the Maker, poems startle us into awareness of the overlooked, the nearly always invisible…and the marvelous, those aspects of life that come under the rubric of 'mystery,' in all senses of the word. Hutchins combines a pitch-perfect and precise lyricism with a postmodern sensibility of language's materiality." Previous collections include The Stranger Dissolves, a Lambda Award finalist, and Collecting Light. The first Poet Laureate of the City of Albany, California, she counts among her honors two Barbara Deming Awards, a James Phelan Award, and a fellowship to Summer Literary Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia, where some of the poems in this new book originated.


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22 OCTOBER 2015 — thursday

Marsha de la O and Lisa Erin Robertson

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Marsha de la O and Lisa Erin Robertson, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org, wheelchair accessible, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com)

Marsha de la O's new book of poems is Antidote for Night. David Wojahn says, "Her poems are bracing, frightening, and—I would go so far as to say—prophetic. Antidote for Night is, quite simply, a remarkable accomplishment." Her first collection, Black Hope, won the New Issues Press Poetry Prize. She and her husband Phil Taggart live in Ventura, California where they organize events and a reading series and where they edit and publish the literary journal Askew. They also founded the annual Ventura Erotic Poetry reading, a popular southern California literary event.
Lisa Erin Robertson's first book of poems is The Orbit of Known Objects. Edward Falco says, "In the universe of her poems, buried moments cast off their dirt and rise again for the consideration of her readers. Robertson is a poet of exquisite sensibilities, with a generous heart and an eye for the sadness and beauty of our brief, mysterious lives." She has worked in public health for many years.


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25 OCTOBER 2015 — sunday

Lucille Lang Day and Peter Neil Carroll

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

Peter Neil Carroll's new book of poems is Fracking Dakota. Robert S. Fogarty says, "Peter Neil Carroll's welcome volume of delicious poems, Fracking Dakota: Poems for a Wounded Land, is about American landscapes and the cartography of our inner worlds. He meditates at Grant's Tomb, the Natchez Trace, and the Redwood Valley reminding us that what poets say echoes deep in the soul." His two previous collections are Riverborne: A Mississippi Requiem and A Child Turns back to Wave: Poetry of Lost Places. He's also written the memoir Keeping Time. A former professor of American History as well as a poet, he has also been a host of "Booktalk" on Pacifica Radio.
Lucille Lang Day's new books of poems are Becoming an Ancestor and the chapbook Dreaming of Sunflowers: Museum Poems, co-winner of the 2014 Blue Light Poetry Award. Of a previous collection, The Curvature of Blue, F. D. Reeve says, "Is the sky blue? Lucille Lang Day's poems paint it a hundred different ways, full of geometry and change, structure and feeling, as plangent as a sunset, as secret as an electromagnetic field." She has published a number of previous poetry collections and chapbooks, including her first book of poems, Self-Portrait with Hand Microscope, which won the Joseph Henry Jackson Award. She's also author of the memoir Married at Fourteen.


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5 NOVEMBER 2015 — thursday

Kathleen Weaver and Jane Downs

Poetry Flash presents a book launch reading by Kathleen Weaver for Too Much Happens, with poet and fiction writer Jane Downs, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org, wheelchair accessible, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com)

Jane Downs is a poet, fiction writer, and essayist. The author of three chapbooks, including April Elegy, she is also one of four poets published in The Book of Now, Poetry for the Rising Tide; her poems have appeared in Ashville Poetry Review, Spillway, The North American Review, and many other journals. Her poems have been collected in letterpress, broadside, and chapbook form both at Brown University and University of California at Davis. Her novella The Sleeping Wall won the Fiction Fix Novella Award for 2013. She is a partner in Red Berry Editions.
Kathleen Weaver’s debut book of poems is Too Much Happens. Alissa Valles says, “The poems in this book move simultaneously toward clarity and compassion, traveling through geological time to achieve a perspective in which the contemporary world’s cruelties and depredations can be faced, free of rhetoric and posturing, with an ascetic, often witty justice.” A translator, biographer, and editor as well as a poet, Kathleen Weaver’s books include Where the island Sleeps Like a Wing: Selected Poetry, by Nancy Morejón; Nicaraguan Sketches, by Julio Cortázar; and Fire from the Mountain: The Making of a Sandinista, by Omar Cabezas—all translations from the Spanish—and the biography with poetry translations Peruvian Rebel: The World of Magda Portal. She has also co-edited The Other Voice: Twentieth Century Women Poets in Translation and Penguin Book of Women Poets.


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8 NOVEMBER 2015 — sunday

Rebecca Foust and Susan Terris

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

Rebecca Foust’s new book of poems is Paradise Drive, winner of the 2015 Press 53 Award for Poetry. Thomas Lux says, “There is great music in these poems, and sonnet after sonnet is masterful. Not since Berryman’s Henry have I been so engaged by a persona: Pilgrim, who ‘like most of we” is good and bad, hapless sometimes, other times approaching wisdom, always sending deeper and deeper her primary roots.” Her previous books include God, Seed: Poetry and Art About the Natural World and All That Gorgeous Pitiless Song. Among her honors are a Foreword Book of the Year Award, an MMM Press Poetry Book Prize, and two Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook prizes.
Susan Terris’s newest full-length book of poems is Ghost of Yesterday: New and Selected Poems. Ronald Wallace says of her work, “Susan Terris teases out the terror of the everyday, the elegies for all our lost selves. And yet, in their immense range and variety, their wildness and dangerousness, these poems are finally suffused with poignancy and compassion.” Her 2015 Omnidawn chapbook is Memos; David St. John wrote, “Susan Terris’s Memos are bristling notations and spare sketches from our fractured and fragmented world—yet these poems can also be understood as celebrations of both wisdoms gained and innocence lost. Scenes that sometimes begin as cameos shift subtly into raw memento mori for times lost or unforgiven. These vignettes are brilliantly rendered, precisely inscribed—and always impossible to forget.” Among her other book are The Homelessness of Self, Contrariwise, Natural Defenses, and Eye of the Holocaust. She was for seven years co-editor of RUNES, A Review of Poetry. She is now editor of Spillway and poetry editor of Pedestal Magazine and In Posse Review. She’s won a Pushcart Prize, and her work will appear in Best American Poetry 2015.


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12 NOVEMBER 2015 — thursday

Bonnie Wai-Lee Kwong and Khaty Xiong

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Bonnie Wai-Lee Kwong, ravel, and Khaty Xiong, Poor Anima, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org, wheelchair accessible, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com)

Bonnie Wai-Lee Kwong’s first book of poems is ravel. Koon Woon says, “In this ‘multilingual’ collection of poems, Bonnie Wai-Lee Kwong writes of the subtext of terror in every ‘civilized good.’ Hidden histories, suffering, and injustice are calmly dissected by this poet with clear eyes and straight diction—words that at once enlighten, empower, and untangle.” ravel was a finalist for the Many Voices Project from New Rivers Press and the White Pine Press Poetry Prize. Bonnie Wai-Lee Kwong is both a poet and a software developer in the San Francisco Bay Area. Among her projects is a digital anthology, The Taste of Each, curated around references to oranges and bananas in various literary and artistic works across the world.
Khaty Xiong’s debut book of poems is Poor Anima. Elizabeth Robinson says, “Khaty Xiong writes a penumbra poetry…Xiong’s poetry is also a sacrificial poetry, both in the sense that it knows and performs ritual, and in the sense that it gives itself up, completely, to currents that it perceives but can’t tame…These poems are deeply strange, deeply courageous, deeply beautiful.” She is a second-generation Hmong-American from Fresno, California. Born to Hmong refugees from Laos, she is the seventh daughter among her fifteen brothers and sisters. She is the author of two chapbooks, Elegies, winner of the Merriam-Frontier Award, and Deer Hour.


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4 DECEMBER 2015 — friday

Maxine Hong Kingston, Fred Marchant, Jane Mead, Jean Valentine

Poetry Flash presents a reading by acclaimed poets and writers Maxine Hong Kingston, Fred Marchant, Jane Mead, Jean Valentine, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org, wheelchair accessible, Diesel, A Bookstore, 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, note different time, 6:30 (510/653-9965, dieselbookstore.com)

Maxine Hong Kingston’s most recent book is the memoir-in-verse I Love a Broad Margin to My Life. The books that have brought her fame throughout her career include The Woman Warrior, China Men, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book, and The Fifth Book of Peace. She’s also editor of Veterans of War, Veteran’s of Peace, an anthology of 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, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, PEN West Award in Fiction, and a National Humanities Medal from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Fred Marchant was one of the first officers of the US Marine Corps to be honorably discharged as a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. His book Tipping Point, which arose from those experiences, first published in 1993, was re-issued in 2013. Other books of poems include Full Moon Boat; House on Water, House in Air; and The Looking House. He is the founding director of the Creative Writing Program and the Poetry Center at Suffolk University in Boston where he is a Professor of English.
Jane Mead’s new book is Money Money Money |Water Water Water. Cole Swenson says, “It’s a beautiful, seamless book that never stops gathering force—one in which the strength, brilliance, and movement of the phrase is the ultimate ecosystem.” She’s the author of three previous collections, most recently The Usable Field, and she’s the recipient of grants and awards from the Whiting, Guggenheim, and Lannan foundations.
Jean Valentine’s new book of poems is Shirt in Heaven. She has published twelve previous books of poetry; her collection Door in the Mountain won the National Book Award in 2004. She co-translated Dark Elderberry Branch, poetry and prose of Maria Tsvetaeva, with Ilya Kaminsky, and edited a book of essays on the poetry of Eleanor Rass Taylor, The Lighthouse Keeper. In 1965, she won the Yale Younger Poets Award for her first book, Dream Barker. The recipient of the 2009 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, she lives in New York City.


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