Stephen Kessler

Stephen Kessler and Mong-Lan

7 MAY 2015 — thursday

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Stephen Kessler and Mong-Lan, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org, wheelchair accessible, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com)

MORE ABOUT THE READERS
Stephen Kessler is a poet, translator, prose-writer, and editor. He will read from his new book of poems, Where Was I?, and also launch his new translation of the Spanish poet Luis Cernuda. Jack Marshall says of Where Was I?, "These vivid impressions are recreated, in Kessler's compressed and flowing prose, as a kind of portable magic our past lives weave in us, and that magic transforms the present in which we 'relive what we missed the first time.'" Forbidden Pleasures: New Selected Poems [1924-1949] is the title of the new translation of Luis Cernuda, one of the poets of Spain's famous Generation of '27. Recent books of Kessler's include Scratch Pegasus, poems; Poems of Consummation, by the Vicente Aleixandre, translation; The Tolstoy of the Zulus: On Culture, Arts & Letters; and the novel The Mental Traveler.
Mong-Lan is a Vietnamese-born multi-disciplinary artist, poet, painter, photographer, composer, instrumentalist, singer, dancer, and teacher of Argentine tango. Her new book of poems is One Thousand Minds Brimming: poems & art; David Shapiro says, "…I praise these poems of praise which collapse distance and makes us feel, as O'Hara seemed to say, poetry is just a telephone call away." Among her collections are Song of the Cicadas, which won the Juniper Prize, a number of books touching on tango, one bilingual in English and Spanish, and Force of the Heart: Tango, Art, which includes drawings, paintings, and a tango-inspired poem. She's a former Wallace E. Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and her poems have been anthologized in Best American Poetry and The Pushcart Book of Poetry: Best Poems from 30 Years of the Pushcart Prize.