Build Community Through Poetry
Support Poetry Flash's year-round literary programs, events, and publishing.
PROGRAMS
Suzanne Lummis. Photo by Alexis Rhone Fancher.
Lois P. Jones, Jim Natal, and Jeremy Ra
by Suzanne Lummis
I’ve done a little sleuthing. Yes, I’ve done some detective work, though not through the streets.… My inquiries have determined that up over the grapevine, on the other side of the Tehachapi Mountain range, and across the Great Central Valley, and beyond Livermore, many people don’t know what’s happening here in Los Angeles, poetry-wise. One Northern California poet had heard only of Wanda Coleman, whom he acknowledged is no longer writing, or among us—except in spirit. Another could only think of Bukowski…. read more
Linda J. Albertano. Photo by Alexis Rhone Fancher.
by Suzanne Lummis
She was Los Angeles's veteran multi-disciplinary performance artist of the city's Second Wave (who'd found her calling when she studied with Rachel Rosenthal, a leading figure in Los Angeles's performance art movement's First Wave, in the '70s). She was a vocalist, musician and poet, or writer of poem-like things, speaker of witty, surrealist monologues. read more
by Denise Low
Michael Walsh, a 2022 Lambda Gay Poetry finalist, is the editor of Queer Nature: A Poetry Anthology, a 2023 Lambda Award finalist. His poetry books include Creep Love and The Dirt Riddles, winner of the Miller Williams Poetry Prize and Thom Gunn Award. He lives in a valley among coulees and springs in southwest Wisconsin, where his eco-queer and literary works are taking shape. read more
by M.M. Adjarian
When ChatGPT came out, I lifted one world-weary eyebrow then returned to the business of my life. This was, after all, the post-human age; AI and robots formed the backbone of an emergent reality of the kind visionary twentieth century science fiction writers Isaac Asimov—and predecessors like Victorian novelist Samuel Butler—had been exploring for 150 years. read more
Photo by Miguel Paglieri.
A Review by Richard Silberg
The Volcano and After: Selected and New Poems, 2002-2019
Alicia Suskin Ostriker
German has a word for 'man', Mann; and for 'woman', Frau; but it also has the word Mensch, for which in English we have to go to the sentence-sagger 'human being'. Yiddish uses the same word to mean, also, someone of honor, of great respect. Doubtless this could apply to many other poets, as well, but I've always thought especially of Alicia Ostriker as a 'Mensch' in a blending of those two meanings. read more
Photo by Douglas Salin.
An Interview with Kim Shuck, 7th Poet Laureate of San Francisco
by Lee Rossi
Kim Shuck, writer, weaver, and beadwork artist, was San Francisco's seventh poet laureate from 2017-2021. A Native American, a member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, and a native San Franciscan, she is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Deer Trails (City Lights Books) and Exile Heart (That Painted Horse Press), as well as a work of prose, Rabbit Stories. In 2019, she published Murdered Missing, a book of poems about violence against indigenous women. Her work appears in When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through, the newly released Norton anthology of Native American poetry edited by Joy Harjo. read more
An Interview with Gail Wronsky
by Ramón García
Gail Wronsky is the author, coauthor, or translator of fifteen books of poetry and prose, including Under the Capsized Boat We Fly: New and Selected Poems, Imperfect Pastorals, Poems for Infidels, and Dying for Beauty, a finalist for the Western Arts Federation Poetry Prize. She’s the translator of Argentinean poet Alicia Partnoy’s Fuegos Florales/Flowering Fires and teaches Creative Writing and Women’s Literature at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. read more
On Robert Sward’s Work
by Jack Foley
Robert Sward, Santa Cruz Poet Laureate 2016-2018, died on February 21, 2022. He was born on June 23, 1933. His career began in the late 1950s. Today, he is a well-known poet, but he is not nearly as well-known as he should be. read more
Photo by Jerome Robinson.
The Sound of Al Young Remembered
by Jack Foley
The many expressions of grief at the death of poet Al Young (1939-2021) are a testimony to the considerable extent that he was an important and much-loved West Coast figure. His friend Ishmael Reed has called him "one of the most underrated writers in the country." read more
Michael McClure (1932-2020). Photo by Christopher Felver, 2000.
Mule Kick Blues and Last Poems, Michael McClure's final book, has just been published by City Lights Books. A powerful collection written during McClure's last years, it was edited before the poet's death in May 2020. Anne Waldman said of it, "This legendary rockstar eco-poet's gemlike modal structures will keep humming while 'black ants circle a bubble of honey.' A final performance from a master poet."
An Everything Man:The Passing of Michael McClure
by Bruce Isaacson
The world seems filled by madness in the meanwhile, but the passing of Michael McClure at eighty-seven in May merits the consideration of poets. McClure was an everything-man, a star spanning the history of the era that made us—dramatist, novelist, songwriter, actor, theorist, performance artist, art critic, organizer, intellectual, and rock-and-roll performer. read more
An Interview with Margaret Randall
by Lee Rossi
Margaret Randall, poet and activist, is the author of 150 books. For twenty-five years she lived in Latin America, first in Mexico, then Cuba, and finally Nicaragua, before returning to the United States. Deemed a "subversive," she fought a five-year battle to regain her U.S. citizenship. While in Latin America she raised four children and worked a variety of jobs, always finding time to participate in the literary and political struggles of her host countries. Now in her eighties, she remains incredibly active and engaged. In 2020, she published a book of pandemic poems; translations of Latin American poetry and memoir; a volume of Ecuadorian poetry, which she selected and translated; and two memoirs, one about her life as a poet, feminist and revolutionary and the other, My Life In 100 Objects, a multi-disciplinary work featuring her photographs as well as her writing. read more
Lucille Lang Day on North Seymour, Galápagos Islands, 2017.
by Lucille Lang Day
The first time I heard about the Berkeley Poets Co-op was when my friend Paul Aebersold showed me a set of colorful posters he'd made by silk-screening his photographs and pairing them with quotes from poems by Co-op members. It was the fall of 1971, and I was twenty-three years old. read more
Ursula K. Le Guin. Photo by Eileen Gunn.
A review by Richard Silberg
[A] look at two decidedly older poets, Ursula K. Le Guin, who died in 2018 at eighty-nine, and Stanley Moss, still kicking strong now in his nineties. Doubtless this has something to do with my being rather a geezer, myself, but it has more to do, I think, with my perception of depth, a wiry toughness, with two poets, each in their very different ways solitary, idiosyncratic, each trenching richly into their long, fertile pasts. read more
Jericho Brown
The Bay Area Book Festival features "The Beautiful Witness We Bear," an online conversation with Jericho Brown, The Tradition, 2020 Pulitzer Prize-winner for Poetry, and Nikky Finney, Love Child's Hotbed of Occasional Poetry, National Book Award-winner for Head Off & Split, on the Bay Area Book Festival's YouTube channel. Moderated by Ismail Muhammad, this event premiered in June. Get the link at the Bay Area Book Festival home page, or go to the BABF YouTube page. Here's the trailer: https://youtu.be/6WMX_blWOcI.
The poets discuss the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and many others with the current protests against police brutality, racism, and white supremacy. They explore the power of poetry to capture human experience and share their own intense experiences. This is a time for us to listen and learn. Poetry Flash stands, along with the BABF, against police killings of unarmed Black citizens and the militarized response to peaceful protests. The BABF says about their powerful program, "Witnessing this exchange was one way of putting ourselves in a position to find out the truth. We think you'll feel the same."
An Interview with Carolyn Forché
by Lee Rossi
Although Carolyn Forché has been writing poetry since the 1970s, she is as well known as a political activist and advocate for human rights. Her recent book, What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance, an account of her experiences in El Salvador during the early 1980s, reflects that perspective, and was named a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award. Her first book, Gathering the Tribes, won the Yale Younger Poets prize, but her second book, The Country Between Us, which included poems about her experiences in El Salvador, made her famous outside the poetry world, igniting a storm of controversy. read more
Truth Against Lies: Suzanne Lummis Speaks Poetry to Power at Beyond Baroqueby Linda J. Albertano
It was January 3, the beginning of the election year and one that would decide the fate of the country for four years, or for far longer than that. It was One Poet, One Poem, aka, "Truth Against Lies, Poet Against the Apocalypse"—modest bill, large claim. read more
Photo by Dorothy Alexander
The Chick:
Homage for Tony Hoagland
by Richard Silberg
If there's a poet/critic for our recent decades, one with a name and a following, it was certainly Tony Hoagland. read more
Photo by Christopher Felver.
"I am a Poet of Memory…"
by Mari L'Esperance
Much has already been written about Philip Levine, a major American poet from Detroit and beloved teacher who published nearly twenty collections of poetry, alongside volumes of essays and translation (his posthumous works are The Last Shift, poems, and My Lost Poets: A Life in Poetry, essays, both from Knopf). Perhaps best known as a poet of elegy who wrote about the lives of working-class people, Levine taught at Fresno State University in California's Central Valley for more than thirty years. read more
D. Nurkse. Photo by Jemimah Kuhfeld.
An Interview with D. Nurkse
by Lee Rossi
D. Nurkse is the author of eleven books of poetry, the latest a re-telling of the story of Tristan and Iseult entitled Love in the Last Days. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and The Times Literary Supplement, among many others. His prizes include fellowships from both the Guggenheim foundation and the NEA, and from 1996-2001 he served as Poet Laureate of Brooklyn. He has taught prison inmates at Rikers Island, as well as students at Sarah Lawrence, Columbia, and the New School. He is an active campaigner for human rights, serving for a time on the board of Amnesty International, and has written frequently on the subject. read more
Brenda Hillman. Photo by Forrest Gander.
A review by Iris Jamahl Dunkle
Terry Tempest Williams writes in her breakthrough essay, "The Open Space of Democracy," when we experience something fully, it opens us; it "creates a chasm in our heart, an expansion in our lungs…We breathe deeply and remember fear for what it is—a resistance to the unknown." Mississippi by Ann Fisher-Wirth and Extra Hidden Life, among the Days by Brenda Hillman are two stunning new poetry collections that offer us poetic duets with complicated experiences. read more
The News from Poems:
Why Poetry Matters Now
by Susan Cohen
I grew up writing poetry. When I was an eighteen-year-old sophomore at Cal, I applied to my first workshop, submitted my poems, and was rejected. I thought that meant I had no talent and I didn't write another poem for almost thirty years. Sometimes I think I had to wait until I was old enough to withstand rejection. We all know, as poets, about rejection. read more
Postscript for Julia Vinograd
by Richard Loranger
Julia's gone and it feels like the end of an era. I didn't expect that; I knew she would pass soon and it didn't occur to me once, but it really, deeply does feel that way. Julia was the core of something, a beating heart that moved a lot of psyches forward through momentum of poetry. Those psyches will continue to move forward, 'cause that's what psyches do, but they'll have to get used to a different torque, a slightly different engine propelling them. read more
Flying with "Julia" Poems: Julia Vinograd (1943-2018)
by Richard Silberg
Julia Vinograd, locally famous as 'the Bubble Lady of Telegraph Avenue', and 'the unofficial Poet Laureate of Berkeley', died on December 5 at the age of seventy-four.… I can't remember when I first met Julia; it seems as if I had always known her. We were both poets and among the tribe of Berkeley people who used the Med, the Café Mediterranean on Telegraph Avenue, as our living room. read more
Julia Vinograd
"All the Night Stars" and guidelines for her tribute anthology
read poem
Jack Foley
"For Julia"
read poem
Martín Espada. Photo by Christopher Felver.
The Fin in the Water
An Interview with Martín Espada
by Lee Rossi
For nearly forty years Martín Espada has been a voice for the marginalized and oppressed and a key contributor to the formation of Latinx literature. At a time when American poetry was fixated on questions of subjectivity and form, Espada focused on the real world of politics and history. read more
And Then There Was a Revolution
An Interview with Nancy Morejón
by Kathleen Weaver
Nancy Morejón is a renowned Cuban poet as well as a critic, translator and cultural worker. She is the author of many volumes of poetry, including translations into English such as Looking Within/Mirar adentro (Selected poems 1954-2000) edited by Juanamaría Cordones-Cook. A recently published selection is Homing Instincts, translated by Pamela Carmell, Cubana Books, 2014. Where the Island Sleeps Like a Wing, Selected Poetry by Nancy Morejón, Black Scholar Press, appeared in 1985, translated by Kathleen Weaver. read more
From Where the Island Sleeps Like a Wing: Selected Poetry
Translated by Kathleen Weaver
read poems
Maurya Simon. Photo by Jamie Clifford.
Fireflies in a Jar
An Interview with Maurya Simon
by Meryl Natchez
Maurya Simon has published ten full-length books of poetry, each one of them unique. Her most recent book, The Wilderness: New and Selected Poems, 1980-2006, appeared this year from Red Hen Press, complete with beautiful color illustrations of her ekphrastic "Weavers Series" poems, reproduced from the original paintings by Simon's mother, Baila Goldenthal. She lives in Mt. Baldy, in the Angeles National Forest of the San Gabriel Mountains, in southern California. read more
Shakespeare and Company, Paris: A History of the Rag & Bone Shop of the Heart
edited by Krista Halverson
reviewed by Carl Landauer
One of my teachers, Austryn Wainhouse, the translator of De Sade (first under the pseudonym Pieralassandro Casavini in Paris but later as a staple of Grove Press), inspired me on my first trip to Paris to make a pilgrimage to Shakespeare and Company just across from Notre Dame. At the time, I was unaware of the difference between Sylvia Beach's interwar Shakespeare and Company on rue de l'Odéon, which had published Joyce's Ulysses and was second home (sometimes even the mailing address) for the lost generation of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Dos Passos, and George Whitman's postwar book store, first named Librairie le Mistral, only to be renamed Shakespeare and Company in 1964, reportedly with Sylvia Beach's blessing. read more
Photo by Mark Savage.
Restless Spirits:
An Interview with Cecilia Woloch
by Amy Pence
It's tough to keep track of the poet Cecilia Woloch. In the spring, you'll find her teaching in a small college in Georgia. By May, she's in a Paris café, surrounded by aspiring poets enrolled in her workshop. July finds her in that small cabin in the Carpathians, tracking down the mystery of her Roma grandmother. The title of her first novel Sur la Route…perfectly captures Woloch's on-the-road lifestyle where travel and poetry interweave. read more
Central American Book of the Dead
Balam Rodrigo, translated by Dan Bellm
reviewed by Richard Silberg
In these days when migrants to our southern border are being called a threat, economically, psychosocially, politically, when these desperate others create an acute problem for our nation to solve, it would perhaps behoove us to gain some sense of who these migrants actually are. read more
Frangible Operas: Poems
Susan Kelly-DeWitt
reviewed by Tom Goff
For cover-to-cover excellence and poetic urgency, [this] may be Susan Kelly-DeWitt's best-ever poetry collection. One gift I hadn't previously found a name for in Susan Kelly-DeWitt's poetry is her sheer knack for arranging her poems attractively by book, and by sections within a book. A rather obvious thing to notice, you might say? read more
When Your Sky Runs Into Mine
Rooja Mohassessy
reviewed by Carl Landauer
This immensely skilled debut by Iranian-born poet Rooja Mohassessy is broadly autobiographical. We see her engage in the delicate art of survival, dealing with various oppressions and aggressions, beginning with poems relating to the early years of the Islamic Republic and the Iran-Iraq War and ending with her experience in Northern California. read more
Sketches from Spain: Homage to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
Peter Neil Carroll
reviewed by Philip C. Kolin
No one is better qualified than Peter Neil Carroll to write a book of memorial poems about the valiant men and women who volunteered for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to fight the fascists in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939. read more
What We Were Born For
Emilie Lygren
reviewed by Dave Seter
Lygren sees our complex society through a new lens, one adjusted to this emerging worldview. Heart on her sleeve, she tattoos what she sees onto the page, indelible, hard to forget even when the reader places the book aside. read more
An Ordinary Life
B.H. Fairchild
reviewed by Richard Silberg
An Ordinary Life moves in a rush, a fullness of voices and stories….[the] book is set chiefly in Kansas, spanning several generations out of the dust bowl to the present…. The style is both expansive, almost oratory as it unfolds its tale, and yet at the same time clipped and matter-of-fact in its payoff finish. read more
A Map of Every Undoing
Alicia Elkort
reviewed by Peggy Dobreer
[This] is a first book wrought with lace and steel, reimagined tales and rich feminist declaratives. It draws the reader into a complex cartography of abundant bullies, cruel infractions, acts of disappearance, and finally, always, love, nature, and restoration. read more
A Poem Is a House
Linda Ravenswood
reviewed by Lee Rossi
The sections are various, yet form an urgent whole…a poem is a house, the poet tells us, a house floating on water…a poem is a woman, a slave, a footnote; a poem is history, genocide, diaspora; a poem is a husband who is also stranger and ghost. read more
A Country of Strangers, New and Selected Poems
D. Nurkse
reviewed by Richard Silberg
Nurkse’s compelling, unusual voice…resists acceptance, an easy embrace, insists on its otherness, even remoteness, while pursuing its parallel realms, so persuasive and engaging, so workably close. Orienting and disorienting, offering a bare, glinting beauty. read more
Simultaneities and Lyric Chemisms
Ardengo Soffici, translation by Olivia Sears
reviewed by Dave Seter
Reading Olivia Sears’s recent translation is a little like visiting an art museum. Each poem fills the mind in the way a large-scale canvas fills a museum wall. There may be a focal point or central theme, but at the margins of the page or canvas, subplots abound. read more
Pandemic Soul Music
S.A. Griffin
reviewed by Daniel Yaryan
S.A. Griffin’s new book is an eclectic jukebox of cross-pollinating poetic hits that traverse many different genres. There’s Venice West Beat Generation lineage, strong DADA DNA, and a foundation springboard from West Coast punk rock lyricism sent into the future via Jello Biafra era Dead Kennedys or the Los Angeles band X. read more
In the Cities of Sleep
Elizabeth C. Herron
reviewed by Jonah Raskin
If you didn't have the inclination or the pizzazz to celebrate National Poetry in April, not to worry. There's still lots of time to enjoy [this] new book of poems by Sonoma County's newest Poet Laureate, Elizabeth C. Herron. read more
Burns
Susan Gevirtz
reviewed by Andrew Joron
The title of Susan Gevirtz's new poetry collection, Burns, is both noun and verb. As noun, it could refer to injuries or damage caused by fire; as verb, it proposes the action of fire in the present tense, as ongoing transmutation. read more
Creativity: Where Poems Begin
Mary Mackey
reviewed by Tom Goff
Poet and novelist Mary Mackey's Creativity is both effervescent and analytical. Her new book serves as part memoir, part guide to the "inner poet" in her readers, part wisdom literature; but ultimately, Creativity resists easy classification or precisely limited function, and that resistance is a virtue. read more
cityscapes: a quilt of poetry
A.D. Winans
reviewed by Jack Foley
There are things A.D. Winans doesn’t do. He doesn’t write sonnets, for instance. But you don’t go to A.D. Winans for sonnets. You go to him for truth—or at least a side of the truth that isn’t usually expressed in a poem. read more
Are You Afraid?
Brian Strang
reviewed by Andrew Joron
Poetic Minimalism—spare wording, formal reduction—can sometimes achieve maximal effect, as in the mystical poems of Robert Lax. This holds true for the poetry of Brian Strang, whose minimalism leads not to mysticism but to a sense of rootedness in the hard ground of existence. read more
The 5150 Poems
Sandra McPherson
reviewed by Lucille Lang Day
The 5150 Poems is a book about mental breakdown and recovery. Section 5150 of the California Welfare and Institutions Code, which went into full effect in 1972, authorizes police officers and medical professionals to involuntarily confine people with a suspected mental illness for 72 hours if they are considered a danger to themselves or others. read more
The Blank Page
Iván Argüelles
reviewed by Carl Landauer
With The Blank Page, Iván Argüelles brings us another volume of poems, written in daily increments, marshaling a vast expanse of literature and myth with wonderfully imaginative juxtapositions, while venturing into the most significant questions of life and death. read more
Record
George Keenen
reviewed by Jack Foley
RECORD was written in a burst, in two nights in 1976, "with time off for coffee at Terminal Lunch in San Francisco." In its original form it was hand printed with rubber stamps. read more
Fossils in the Making
Kristin George Bagdanov
reviewed by Rosalinda Monroy
Bodies are the focal point of Kristin Bagdanov's debut poetry collection, Fossils in the Making. In it, she explores not just the human body, but animal bodies, non-sentient bodies, bodies of water, and earth bodies (landforms). read more
Catwalk
Meryl Natchez
reviewed by Susan E. Gunter
Meryl Natchez's latest volume of poetry contains seventy-nine poems, poems employing an abundance of forms, including haibuns, cinquains, looseplexes, odes, free verse, and prose poems. The poet's roving consciousness twists through the narrow catwalks of these varied lyrics. read more
At Work on the Garments of Refuge
Daniel Marlin and Ralph Dranow
reviewed by Lucille Lang Day
One of the things I like best about [this book] is the accessibility of the poems. There is nothing here of the aesthetic some contemporary poets have adopted that calls for making poems so difficult that you need to parse them like Schrödinger's equation. read more
Letters To A Young Brown Girl
Barbara Jane Reyes
reviewed by Catalina Cariaga
"That little girl was me," quipped now Vice President Kamala Harris in an early 2020 primary debate with Joe Biden, when she blasted him for his previously held opinions on busing in schools during the mid-1970s. That moment reminded all listening how race directly affects people of color in some of the most basic aspects of life in their communities. read more
A Folio for the Dark
Camille Norton
reviewed by Lee Rossi
In a recent interview poet Camille Norton tells us that although she is a lesbian feminist, she reads and enjoys the white heterosexual males of English poetry. A working-class, East Coast Catholic who teaches at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California, she says, "Education saved me from a chaotic family background." read more
Deaf Republic
Ilya Kaminsky
reviewed by Rob Lipton
Like a screenplay written by Samuel Beckett, there is a cinematic level of description: a town being invaded, a town fighting back, and then a kind of reckoning…the deeper spirits of language, imagery and silence are conjured. read more
Time Crunch
Cathy Colman
reviewed by Keith Shein
I should make my bias known: I love lyric poetry, its emotion, directness, its address of the human condition. And I hate what it's mostly become: confession, reportage, diary entries broken into verse lines that can't get off the page. read more
Storage Unit for the Spirit House
Maw Shein Win
reviewed by Seth Amos
The opening line of Maw Shein Win's most recent collection of poems declares, "the nats have stolen my hair." With this line, Win immediately places us in the action. We have no time to ask questions or figure out where we are or how we got there. One detail is already made clear, though: the barrier between spiritual and physical has been destroyed. read more
Gravitational Tug
Susan Kelly-DeWitt
reviewed by Tom Goff
Gravitational Tug, with its fifty-one poems selected from different phases of Susan Kelly-DeWitt's career, is a good introduction to an important body of verse. A writer who can take subjects large or "small" and turn them into accomplished poetry, Kelly-DeWitt has been published in prestigious magazines, yet she deserves an even larger audience than she now enjoys. read more
Transformer
Kathleen Winter
reviewed by John Johnson
The first section begins with an epigraph by Larry Levis, in which he warns that "the nicest guy in the world" carries a switchblade. read more
Shahr-e-jaanaan: The City of the Beloved
Adeeba Shahid Talukder
reviewed by Lee Rossi
Whenever I encounter a poet new to me, one of the first questions I ask myself is, what is her tradition?…We remember that T.S. Eliot, in his famous essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent," argued that a poet cannot be evaluated simply in terms of his own work or of that of his contemporaries; "he must inevitably be judged by the standards of the past." But what if the standards of the past preclude the poet from even opening her mouth? read more
Blood Memory
Gail Newman
reviewed by Gail Rudd Entrekin
For those of us who are not Jewish, no matter how extensively we may have read about the Holocaust and been led into imagining the unthinkable, it is always ultimately not something that happened to us, to our own. read more
Decoding Sparrows
Mariano Zaro
reviewed by Peggy Dobreer
Decoding Sparrows levies a kind of spare elegance on simple acts that elevate them to the miraculous. Mariano Zaro has given us yet another exquisite folio of resplendence made evident through language. read more
A Little More Red Sun on the Human
Gillian Conoley
reviewed by Iris Jamahl Dunkle
I can still remember the first time I read the poetry of Gertrude Stein, or Jack Spicer or Michael Palmer. How when I read their work, I became unmoored, as if on a dark sea where the narrative map I'd come to know as the standard for navigating a poem dissolved in my hands. read more
In the Next Life
Joan Baranow
reviewed by Terry Lucas
In Baranow's new collection, the poet assures us that we need not even leave our rooms to experience the totality of existence, because all worlds are available through poetry. read more
Kerouac: The Last Quarter Century
Gerald Nicosia
reviewed by Mick Parsons
Gerald Nicosia, who became known in 1983 with the publication of his acclaimed Kerouac biography Memory Babe, spent several decades both as a post-Beat poet living and working among Beat poets, many of whom became his friends, and championing the rights of Kerouac's own family. read more
Inner East: Illuminated Poems and Blessings
Marcia Falk
reviewed by Lucille Lang Day
Marcia Falk is best known as a poet, translator, and Judaic scholar, but she is also an artist who has had many solo exhibitions of her oil pastel paintings, and who has created her own art form based on the traditional decorative Jewish plaques called mizrachs. read more
Conscience Place
Joyce Thompson
reviewed by Ann Harleman
In the autumn of 1976 I went to live in the Soviet Union for six months. A U.S. citizen, I was on an academic exchange between two bitterly opposed governments. read more
HaikuDiane di Prima, illustrations George Herms
reviewed by Andy Brumer
A Japanese haiku contains three lines with a 5-7-5 syllabic sequence; it presents a juxtaposition of (usually) two ideas or feelings that join them together transcendentally without losing the individuality or tension between them. read more
BEAT: The Latter Days of the Beat GenerationAndy Clausen
reviewed by Bruce Isaacson
Andy Clausen has written a wild, wide-spirited, and thoughtful memoir of his life as an after-Beat, full of authentic intensity, joy, and sad insight into America of our era. read more
Magellan's ReveriesR. Nemo Hill
reviewed by Richard Loranger
I would like to introduce you to this enthralling book, which holds a cargo of thirty-three discrete yet interlinked poems. read more
Only as the Day Is LongDorianne Laux
reviewed by Meryl Natchez
When you enter the world of Dorianne Laux as revealed in Only as the Day Is Long: New and Selected Poems, you enter a world rich with domestic imagery. Much of that imagery is fraught with violence. read more
GüeraRebecca Gaydos
reviewed by Rosalinda Monroy
Rebecca Gaydos's latest poetry collection is a fearless dive into the world of the making and unmaking of identity through language, of our own, and that of others. read more
Everything HurtsJuliana McCarthy
reviewed by Peggy Dobreer
Juliana McCarthy (who once played the matriarch on an iconic soap opera and had a recurring role on Star Trek) is known for saying that her son, poet Brendan Constantine, mentored her into her autumnal poetry career. read more
Things That Go Trump in the NightPaul Fericano
reviewed by Jack Foley
Among the many aspects of Donald John Trump, the pride and/or embarrassment of Queens, is his function as Muse. read more
The Last MosaicElizabeth Cooperman and Thomas Walton
reviewed by Jesse Morse
Early on in The Last Mosaic, the narrator proclaims "Writing imitates other media that express things better." Directly following the proclamation is an invitation to "feel free to cut these out and arrange them pictorially however you like." The "these" the narrator refers to are the vignettes/fragments/ sentences/quotes that comprise the entirety of [the work]. read more
Like Flesh Covers BoneJan Steckel
reviewed by Jack Foley
Can you name a warm, extremely intelligent, caring, loving, funny, good humored, Jewish, married, ex-medical doctor, bisexual woman who writes unfailingly excellent poetry? (Why was she never a nun?) This riddle is no riddle if you happen to possess Jan Steckel's new book. read more
If Wants To Be The Same As Is: Essential Poems of David Bromigeedited by Bob Perelman, Ron Silliman, Jack Krick
reviewed by Pat Nolan
Rarely do collected poems have titles that capture the fundamental nature of the poet whose work is gathered between two covers. The reader has to be content with a generic The Collected Poems of (insert name here). Not so with David Bromige's collected poems. read more
The Elements of San JoaquinGary Soto
reviewed by Lee Rossi
Nowadays Gary Soto is best known for his penetrating and good-humored evocations of Latino life. In the course of a long and productive career, he has written or edited over forty books, as well as two films and a play. Soto's focus throughout this immense oeuvre is to depict the challenges of growing up brown and poor. read more
The Day You Miss Your ExitJacqueline Berger
reviewed by Joan Gelfand
If a successful book cover telegraphs what is inside—then Jackie Sackheim's photograph on The Day You Miss Your Exit does its job: a wide Los Angeles boulevard at a mysterious in-between time, dusk. Are we Mid-City? San Fernando Valley? Or, perhaps, on "Pedestrian Pico"? read more
Invisible Gifts: PoemsMaw Shein Win
reviewed by Jack Foley
A "Glittering Palace" may be a place or a mind—or a book. Maw Shein Win's phrase, "ruins of a glittering palace" (my emphasis) might refer as well to the sorrows of the ancient country of her ancestry. That the reference is multiple and not specifically tied down is typical of this book. read more
OneGerald Fleming
reviewed by Lee Rossi
We all recall what Robert Frost said about poetry and tennis. With each new book, Gerald Fleming seems determined to raise Frost's 'net' higher and higher. In the afterword to his latest volume, Fleming tells us, "This book began accidentally," in response to a challenge to write something in form. Instead of attempting the usual sonnet or sestina, he decided to use only one-syllable words. read more
Bullets into Bells: Poets & Citizens Respond to Gun Violenceedited by Brian Clements, Alexandra Teague, Dean Rader
reviewed by Meryl Natchez
I picked up Bullets into Bells with some trepidation. An anthology of poems and responses about gun violence could be pretty grim. But because many major poets are included, I started leafing through. Pretty soon I was hooked. read more
Poetas de CaféAdelaida Las Santas
reviewed by John Oliver Simon
We've seen some hella poetry reading scenes in the Bay Area. None of us are old enough to remember the Berkeley Renaissance with Duncan and Spicer in the late forties…but I was there in June 1968 when Andy Clausen read interminably dressed only in an American Flag necktie, and then there was the Grand Piano series in the late 1970s that birthed Language Poetry, the Café Babar series in the '80s featuring a punk affect of "poetry you can actually read," and so on down to the Woolsey Heights series a couple of years ago with young MFAs overflowing people's houses in North Oakland. read more
Liner NotesAndy Mister
reviewed by Dan Alter
Andy Mister's slim first book encompasses contradictions. It is beguilingly readable, despite many opaque passages; it burrows into despair and self-destruction, and emerges redemptive. Though unquestionably a book of poetry, Mister's volume stakes itself at an angle to the medium. read more
Land of My Father's WarPhyllis Meshulam
reviewed by Shelley Armitage
Like its book cover—a collage—Land of My Father's War speaks through layers of experience, memory, and imagination. The lines of a pillared landscape, wintered over grape vines, and a detail from the Florence Baptistry ceiling merge between brackets of World War II letters, signaling the rich and complex voicing to follow… read more
The Moons of AugustDanusha Laméris
reviewed by Lee Rossi
Danusha Laméris offers us a book of losses. "I've buried a lover, a brother, a son," she tells us early on. But loss is only the starting point. Following the trail of poets such as Ellen Bass and Dorianne Laux, Laméris explores a woman's experience, shaping its timeless (and often neglected) mysteries into song. read more
How to Be Perfect, An Illustrated GuideRon Padgett, pictures by Jason Novak
reviewed by G.P. Skratz
Ron Padgett is one of the most playful of the playful New York School poets, & Jason Novak's work has graced the pages of The New Yorker, The Paris Review, & other sturdy venues. They have produced a frightening book to review: if one judges it, one doesn't really "get" it. read more
ObliterationsErasures from The New York Times
Heather Aimee O'Neill and Jessica Piazza
reviewed by Peggy Dobreer
When I received Obliterations in the mail, I was immediately struck by its visual elegance and cover detail, an abundance of clear white space out of which every other element leapt. And those elements? All of New York represented in the soft confines of an enormous block letter "O." read more
The Market WondersSusan Briante
reviewed by Richard Silberg
Eco-poetics, referring to the growing body of work addressed to our fevered planet—as opposed to the perennial 'nature poetry'—is probably a twenty-first century term. But recently I've been noting another kind of eco-poetry, writing that chews over, not the ecology but the economy. read more
11/5, San Francisco
more info
The 29th Annual Watershed Poetry Festival will be held Saturday, October 5, 2024, Civic Center Park in Berkeley! The festival will showcase a day of poetry for the Earth and our sense of self and place, with music and commentary on climate change, climate action, and our place in nature. We Are Nature Open Reading, bookselling, exhibitors, poetry broadsides, and more, with more poetry and talk on the legendary Strawberry Creek Walk, 10 am, UC Berkeley campus. Watch for updates! More information:
2024 Festival Information
2023 Festival Information
2022 IN-PERSON Festival Information
2022 Festival Information
Sally AshtonPoems from Listening to Mars
read poems
Lynn StronginA Selection from Ukrainian Blues
read poems
Alan SoldofskyThree Poems
read poems
David Shaddock"On the Biden Inauguration"
read poem
Gerald FlemingPoems from The Bastard and the Bishop
read poems
Lynn Ungar"Pandemic"
read poem
Judy HalebskyPoems from Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged)
read poems
NCBA Translation Awards now honor literary translators state-wide!
California's vibrant literary scene will be celebrated on Saturday, September 7, 2024, 2 pm, when the Northern California Book Awards recognize the best published works of 2023 by Northern California authors and California translators, presented by Northern California Book Reviewers, Poetry Flash, and the San Francisco Public Library, with our community partners Mechanics' Institute Library and Women's National Book Association-San Francisco Chapter.
2024 Northern California Book Awards
Fred Cody Award for Lifetime Achievement & Service, 2024
NCBA Groundbreaker Award, 2024
Edited by David Kipen
NCBA Recognition Award, 2024
More information:
NCBA Information
2024 NCBA Awards
2023 NCBA Awards
2022 NCBA Awards
2021 NCBA Awards
© 1972-2021 Poetry Flash. All rights reserved. | 