Zara Raab and Keith Ekiss

8 SEPTEMBER 2011 — thursday

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

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

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