Sally Ashton

Sally Ashton and Rafaella Del Bourgo

14 SEPTEMBER 2025 — sunday

Poetry Flash presents a reading featuring Rafaella Del Bourgo, launching her new book, A Tune Both Familiar and Strange, poems, and Sally Ashton, Listening to Mars, Art House Gallery & Cultural Center, 2905 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, two blocks north of Ashby BART, refreshments, free, 3:00 pm (poetryflash.org).

Thank you for continuing to support Poetry Flash and our reading series. The featured books will be available for signing at the event and at bookshop.org/shop/poetryflash. This event will be posted on the Poetry Flash YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/channel/UClwdR-uPFNz7XxbBbLcnoEA.

MORE ABOUT THE READERS
Sally Ashton's fifth book is Listening to Mars. Holly Iglesias says, "Listening is the quietest of talents, and the most fruitful. In this moving collection, Sally Ashton brings to readers what she heard as time and space had their way with us during the early years of the pandemic. In these poems, she creates Einsteinian thought experiments, tools for understanding and enduring the grief and beauty of a world where 'nothing stands still.' Loss and wonder, dread and awe gyrate throughout the book, spinning like heavenly bodies, the poet equally rigorous and tender in her search for 'words that make the world look like what it feels like.' Ashton reveres the mysterious movement of the world and offers it as a comfort: 'While Earth kept turning, gravity held us close.'" Her poem "4.6 Billion Years" is now archived on the Moon as part of the Lunar Codex project. A book of personal essays exploring a personal practice and the race to space, Going to the Moon, is forthcoming from Duke University Press. Former Santa Clara County Poet Laureate, Sally Ashton is also Editor-in-Chief of DMQ Review, an online journal featuring prose poetry and art. Now Faculty Emerita, she taught writing at San José State University and continues to teach workshops locally and online.
Rafaella Del Bourgo's brand new full-length collection launching at this event is A Tune Both Familiar and Strange, winner of the Terry J. Cox Award. Lynne Knight says, "These poems take us to places as far flung as Tasmania or Afghanistan, Israel or Iceland, letting us see across time and space into the lives of others, but also into the love and loss of Del Bourgo's own life. The strange becomes familiar as she braids her narratives with images so precise they seem cinematic. Whether elegies, love poems, or lyrics of wild imagining, these poems are marked by tenderness and compassion, even when the difficult or brutal is acknowledged." Rafaella Del Bourgo's honors include the League of Minnesota Poets Prize, Grandmother Earth Poetry Award, Paumanok Poetry Prize, Northern Colorado Writers Prize for Poetry, New Millennium Prize for Poetry, Mudfish Poetry Prize, and the 2025 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize three times. Her previous chapbook is Inexplicable Business: Poems Domestic and Wild. Her writings have has appeared in magazines and journals including Puerto Del Sol, Rattle, Oberon, Nimrod, and The Bitter Oleander. She lives in Berkeley.