Alison Luterman

Alison Luterman and Yiskah Rosenfeld

16 NOVEMBER 2025 — sunday

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Alison Luterman, Hard Listening, and Yiskah Rosenfeld, reading from two recent collections, Tasting Flight and Naked Beside Fish, Art House Gallery & Cultural Center, 2905 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, two blocks north of Ashby BART, refreshments, free, 3:00 pm PST (poetryflash.org).


Thank you for continuing to support Poetry Flash and our reading series. The featured books will be available at the event and on 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

Alison Luterman's new collection is Hard Listening, poems about learning to sing during the pandemic to collaborate with her musician husband. Mirabai Starr says, "Alison Luterman is one of my favorite poetic voices. I eat her poetry like buttered bread and it goes straight into my depleted spiritual bloodstream." Luterman's previous books include See How We Almost Fly, Desire Zoo, Feral City, and The Largest Possible Life. Her poems have appeared in The Sun, The Brooklyn Review, Slipstream, Tattoo Highway, and on the Library of Congress website Poetry 180. Her poems have been featured as Poetry in Motion posters on buses and subway trains in the San Francisco Bay Area and in Portland, Oregon. She has also published many personal essays and feature articles and has written several plays. She writes frequently about her Oakland neighborhood, social justice, personal relationships, urban wilderness, and the uses of art, especially poetry and theater.

Yiskah Rosenfeld's first full-length book of poems is Tasting Flight. Joy Ladin says, "Rooted in the origin myths of Genesis when the Divine 'stepped out of itself onto the slick, dark lid of otherness,' Tasting Flight unflinchingly questions, complicates, and celebrates what it means to be a woman and to be deeply, imperfectly, human." Yiskah Rosenfeld is also the author of Naked Beside Fish, an ekphrastic chapbook. Among her honors are the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize, Reuben Rose Memorial Prize, 2025 Prism Review Award, and a 2023 Frontier Poetry Roots & Roads Prize. Her work has been published in over fifty publications, including The Seattle Review, Rattle, Slippery Elm, and others, as well as in anthologies such as Wild Gods: An Anthology of Ecstatic Poetry and Yentl's Revenge: The Next Wave of Jewish Feminism. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, and teaches workshops on feminism, spirituality, and creativity.