Laurel Ann Bogen and Mk Chavez

21 JULY 2016 — thursday

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by LA poet Laurel Ann Bogen with Oakland poet Mk Chavez, request ASL interpreters one week in advance at editor@poetryflash.org, wheelchair accessible, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com)

MORE ABOUT THE READERS
Laurel Ann Bogen's new book of poems is Psychosis in the Produce Department: New and Selected Poems, 1975-2015. Steve Kowit said, "Laurel Ann Bogen's poems are lethal and smoking…an exuberant mix of human passions, a collection of poems that are at once mad with voltage and utterly sane." Her many collections include Washing a Language and The Last Girl in the Land of Butterflies. Ranging in themes as diverse as horrific beauty and exquisite madness, dysfunctional families, love and anti-love, life in Los Angeles and Hollywood, and growing up as a Baby Boomer, these poems offer sly, humorous, surreal, and genre-busting work that can only be called Vintage Bogen. She was also a founding member of the celebrated performance group Nearly Fatal Women.
Mk Chavez's new book of poems is Mothermorphosis. Blas Falconer says, "The extraordinary poems in Mothermorphosis place readers in the particular life of a daughter and her schizophrenic mother; however, a larger world, full of war and tenderness, misunderstanding and clarity, vulnerability and empowerment…is present, too, so the book speaks with great urgency for all and to all of us." She is author of Virgin Eyes and several other chapbooks; a new full-length collection, Dear Animal, is forthcoming this fall. Co-founder and co-curator of Lyrics & Dirges, the Berkeley-based monthly reading series, she is also co-director of the Berkeley Poetry Festival and a proud member of the Association of Black & Black Writers.