Susan Browne

Susan Browne and Jeanne Wagner

12 JUNE 2025 — thursday

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Susan Browne, Monster Mash, and Jeanne Wagner, One Needful Song, the 2024 Catamaran Book Prize-winner, Art House Gallery & Cultural Center, 2905 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, two blocks north of Ashby BART, refreshments, free, 7:00 pm PDT (poetryflash.org).


Featured books for this reading will be available for signing at the event, and Susan Browne's will also be available at bookshop.org/shop/poetryflash. This event will be posted on the Poetry Flash YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/channel/UClwdR-uPFNz7XxbBbLcnoEA. Thank you for continuing to support Poetry Flash and our reading series.

MORE ABOUT THE READERS

Susan Browne's new poetry book is Monster Mash. Diane Seuss says, "There it is—the timing of a great comedian, and the devastation at the center of every magnificent joke. The result is a book of poems that captures, for me, what it feels like to exist in a culture and a world falling apart at the seams….It tracks the span of a life, the early loss of a mother, and exposes the wisdom that comes to those who endure long enough to earn it, that 'the intelligent thing is to offer everything / to infinite love.'" Her previous poetry collections include Buddha's Dogs, winner of the Four Way Books Intro Prize; Zephyr, winner of the Steel Toe Books Editor's Choice award; and Just Living, winner of the Catamaran Poetry Prize. Her poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry, The Sun, The Southern Review, Rattle, New Ohio Review, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the James Dickey Poetry Prize, Los Angeles Poetry Festival Prize, River Styx International Poetry Contest, Fischer Poetry Prize, and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center fellowship. She lives in Northern California.
Jeanne Wagner's new poetry book is One Needful Song, winner of the 2024 Catamaran Book Prize. Carol Frith says of her work, "At once analytic and passionate, In the Body of Our Lives draws us, with acute emotional precision, into the physical and the tangible in a world increasingly obsessed with the virtual. Jeanne Wagner explores with great skill and feeling the dichotomy of mind/body dualism" Her previous poetry collections include Everything Turns Into Something Else, In the Body of Our Lives, and The Zen Piano Mover, winner of the Stevens Manuscript Award, among others. Her work has appeared in Alaska Review, Cincinnati Review, North American Review, River Styx, Nimrod, Southern Review, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the Joy Harjo Prize, California Quarterly Annual Contest, Cloudbank Poetry Prize, Grayson Book Prize, Ann Stanford Prize, the Briar Cliff Review Award, and more. She lives in Kensington, California.