Mary Mackey and Susan Kolodny

3 NOVEMBER 2011 — thursday

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

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

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