Chana Bloch

Chana Bloch and Rusty Morrison

26 FEBRUARY 2015 — thursday

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Chana Bloch and Rusty Morrison, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org, wheelchair accessible, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com)

MORE ABOUT THE READERS
Chana Bloch will read from Swimming in the Rain: New and Selected Poems 1980-2015. Henri Cole says of her new poems, "Chana Bloch is writing the best poems of her life… [She] is like a Japanese potter mending the cracked and dinged pottery of experience with gold powder sprinkled from her fingers." She is co-translator of The Song of Songs and of the poets Yehuda Amichai and Dalia Ravikovitch. Among her honors are two Pushcart Prizes, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, and the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America.
Rusty Morrison's latest book of poems is Beyond the Chainlink. Lisa Robertson says, "How do we continue to choose, speak and interpret given the weight of the end fact? Silence in Morrison's new work is transformed from an absence to a concept, a potential translator of temporal givens; she tends silence's conscious work with a measure and a subtle ear." Her previous collections have been prize-winners: the true keeps calm biding its story won Ahsahta Press's Sawtooth Prize, the Academy of American Poets James Laughlin Award, Northern California Book Award, and the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America. After Urgency won the Dorset Prize from Tupelo Press, and Whethering won the Colorado Prize for Poetry. She is co-publisher of Omnidawn Press.