Megan Harlan and Mari L'Esperance

20 JANUARY 2011 — thursday

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Megan Harlan, Mapmaking, and Mari L'Esperance, The Darkened Temple, 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
Megan Harlan's first book of poems, Mapmaking, is the winner of the John Ciardi Prize for poetry, selected by Sidney Wade. Alice Fulton says of it. "Megan Harlan's nuanced, visionary poems explore farsickness, the sensation of missing places we've never been, including the imaginary realms of lotusland and limbo…A profound meditation on the permeability of past and present, nature and artifice, self and other, space and time, Mapmaking is a miracle of invention." It's interesting, in this context, that Harlan had lived in seventeen different homes on four different continents by the time she graduated from high school. Her poetry has been published in American Poetry Review and elsewhere, and her fiction, travel writing and book reviews have been published in the San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Times, and elsewhere.

Mari L'Esperance is a Hapa poet, born in Kobe, Japan. Her first full-length book of poems, The Darkened Temple, won the 2007 Prairie Schooner Book Prize; Jane Mead says of it, "Mari L'Esperance enacts the process of defining a self out of fragments of cultural and personal history…by turns narrative, chantlike, fractured, and lyric, these tender, terrifying, and frank poems fight their way into song." An earlier collection, Begin Here, was the winner of the Sarasota Poetry Theatre Press Chapbook Prize. Her poems and prose have appeared in Connotation Press: An Online Artifact, Poetry Kanto, and Prairie Schooner. A recipient of fellowships and grants from the New York Times Company Foundation, Hedgebrook, and Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, Mari L'Esperance lives in the Bay Area.