D. Nurkse

D. Nurkse and Eliot Schain

24 JULY 2022 — sunday

Poetry Flash presents a reading by D. Nurkse, A Country of Strangers: New and Selected Poems, and Eliot Schain, The Distant Sound, online via Zoom, free, 3:00 pm PDT (Register to attend: please click here; you will receive an email with a link to join the reading)


Please join us for a virtual reading on Sunday, July 24 at 3:00 pm PDT. We are excited to bring you this event via Zoom. To register for this reading, please click on the link in the calendar listing above. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. Thank you for continuing to support Poetry Flash and our reading series.

This reading is co-sponsored by Moe's Books in Berkeley. Featured books for this event are available at bookshop.org/shop/poetryflash.

MORE ABOUT THE READERS
This reading was rescheduled from May 22. D. Nurkse's new collection is A Country of Strangers: New and Selected Poems, stretching over thirty-five years. In it, one of our most essential poets "casts a clear eye on our politics, our places, and our heart's hidden stories." He is author of eleven previous collections, including Love in the Last Days: After Tristan and Iseult. Ilya Kaminsky says, "What a joy to have this overview of D. Nurske's marvelous poems—he is a master of lyric mode, one in whose hands the lines come immediately come alive, magic breathes, nuance shimmers and becomes the world all its own, see the doors open into the unknown and we see that it is strangely familiar because strangeness is, in fact, our first language, one we mouthed before words." Nurkse's many honors include a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His poems have appeared in periodicals such as The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, and The Paris Review; he has taught poetry in prison, and, as Brooklyn Poet Laureate, in local schools and the public library system. He has also worked for human rights organizations. A resident of Brooklyn, he currently teaches in the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College.

Eliot Schain most recent collection is The Distant Sound. Bruce Isaacson says, "An unforgettable modern voice…in Schain's poetry, the inexhaustible American hunger confronts its limits—wilderness defiled by industry, the nuclear family gone ballistic, love turned impossible. Here wisdom and madness live side-by-side, take the reader's hand, and walks us toward the uncertain future. Once you have heard his cadences, you will not forget." Eliot Schain's previous books are American Romance and Westering Angels, both from Zeitgeist Press. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Santa Monica Review, Another Chicago Magazine, and Miramar, among other journals, and four anthologies: America, We Call Your Name: Poems of Resistance and Resilience; The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems of the San Francisco Bay Watershed; Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems and Poetics from California; and Aspects of Robinson: Homage to Weldon Kees.
He has served as program director for the Poetry Society of American, taught high school, and is now a psychotherapist in Berkeley, California.