Martha Collins

Martha Collins and Rosa Lane

9 OCTOBER 2016 — sunday

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Martha Collins, Admit One: An American Scrapbook, and Rosa Lane, Tiller North, 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
Martha Collins’s new book of poems is Admit One: An American Scrapbook. Booklist calls it “An unflinching look at the underpinnings of racism in the U.S.…Her poems are lists, definitions, newspaper pages, historic time lines, and biographical facts. These diverse poetic forms highlight the beauty of diversity itself. But Collins never lets up on the driving themes of unethical treatment and collective culpability.” Among her previous collections are Day Unto Day, White Papers, and Blue Front. The last two both won Ohioana awards, and Blue Front also won an Ansfield-Wolf Book Award and was chosen one of “25 Books to Remember” by the New York Public Library. Among her other publications are three books of co-translation from the Vietnamese.
Rosa Lane’s first full-length book of poems is Tiller North, from Sixteen Rivers Press. Jeffrey Levine says, “Rosa Lane’s poetry reminds us why, at a certain time in our lives, we’ve had enough of innocence. Here is a compendium of those so crucial, chronology-defying self-revelations that we only know through our skin. Every line carries with it a resonant sense of what matters and why.” Widely published in literary journals, such as Ploughshares and Crab Orchard Review, she is the author of the chapbook Roots and Reckonings. She works as an architect, with a Ph.D. in sustainable architecture, and she divides her time between Maine and the San Francisco Bay Area.