Donna De La Perrière and Joseph Lease

17 APRIL 2011 — sunday

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

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

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