Ruth L. Schwartz and Ruth Thompson

20 SEPTEMBER 2012 — thursday

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)

More about the readers
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.