Alice Jones

Sharon Coleman and Alice Jones

4 AUGUST 2013 — sunday

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

More about the readers
Alice Jones's new book is Plunge, a nominee for the 2013 Northern California Book Award in poetry. Donald Revell says, "With Plunge, Alice Jones brilliantly and with beautiful tact revives the art of menippean satire.…En route, she proves willing to dismantle anything—including her own voice and her own distinctive music—that might distract us from the ruined truth of our Republic." Her previous full-length collections are The Knot, Extreme Directions (The fifty-four moves of the Tai Chi Sword), and Gorgeous Mourning. Widely anthologized, in Best American Poetry of 1994, Strange Attraction: A ZYZZYVA Anthology, and elsewhere, her honors include an NEA fellowship and the Poetry Society of America's Robert H. Winner and Lyric Poetry Awards; she is a practicing psychoanalyst in Berkeley.
Sharon Coleman's new book of poems is Half Circle. Mary Mackey says, "The poems in Sharon Coleman's Half Circle are haunted by buried landmines of memory, and a past that can't be put to rest. Lyric, tragic, deftly conceived, painterly and yet at the same time dynamic, they give us unexpected images mediated by a fierce, courageous intelligence." She is Director of the Berkeley Poetry Festival, a curator of the Lyrics & Dirges series, and is the faculty advisor for Berkeley City College's award-winning literary and art journal, Milvia Street.