Bill Mayer, Larry Felson, and Steven Rood

19 JANUARY 2012 — thursday

Poetry Flash presents a Paroikia Press reading by poets Bill Mayer, Articulate Matter, Steven Rood, I Say Your Name, and Larry Felson, Dawn Out of Order, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com; wheelchair accessible, ASL interpreters for the deaf and hearing impaired may be requested a week in advance by email, editor@poetryflash.org)

More about the readers
The new Berkeley-based Paroikia Press will be publishing books by all three of these East Bay poets. Larry Felson is the author of Salt and Silver and Body Song. One of the five poets featured in the anthology, Five on the Western Edge, his poems have been published in American Poetry Review and other publications. He has taught English and Journalism at Oakland High for many years and recently taught at the Hellenic International Studies in the Arts (HISA) on the island of Paros, Greece. He is a fiery, headlong, passionate poet, a poet as much political as essentially human. Articulate Matter, Bill Mayer's fourth book of poems, will launch Paroikia Press at this reading. Grace Schulman enthuses about it, "The best of these poems are transcendent, bringing the sacred into common life." Mayer is also a professional photographer who worked with Tony Keppelman on Hummingbirds, a photographic essay published by Little, Brown. I Say Your Name, Steven Rood's first full-length book of poems, is forthcoming from Paroikia; his writing weaves together humor, a deep, plain-spoken conviction, and mystery. All three of these poets have been decades-long participants in a workshop begun in 1966 in the Haight-Ashbury by poets Jack Gilbert, Linda Gregg, Wilbur Wood, and Elizabeth Hughes which continues to this day, now situated in Berkeley.