Richard Newman and Lee Rossi

24 MAY 2015 — sunday

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

MORE ABOUT THE READERS
Richard Newman's new book of poems is All the Wasted Beauty of the World. George Bilgere says of it, "Newman's poems with their formal, lapidary precision, their indelible portraits of life in the cheap bars, back alleys, and rough-hewn edges of the Midwest, surprise a hunger in us for a language larger, wilder, and unabashedly loftier than daily speech." His two previous collections are Domestic Fugues and Borrowed Towns. His poetry has been widely recognized, on Garrison Keillor's radio program Writer's Almanac, in the Best American Poetry anthology, and elsewhere. He lives in St. Louis where he reviews books for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, edits River Styx literary journal, and plays in a band, The Charflies.
Lee Rossi's most recent book of poems is Wheelchair Samurai. Ruth Schwartz says, "These poems are scintillant with wit, shot through with sudden revelations and the startling, brief gleam of compassion and truth. Like the crowd gathered around a suicide in 'Almost Icarus,' Rossi keeps us, his readers, 'straining for a glimpse of that body / its imperfect beauty as fragile as our own." Among his previous collections is Ghost Diary. A staff reviewer and interviewer for the online magazine Pedestal, his poetry, reviews, and interviews have appeared widely, in Poetry Flash, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry East, Chelsea, and elsewhere.