Dan Bellm, Tiffany Higgins and Fred Marchant

20 MARCH 2011 — sunday

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Dan Bellm, Practice, Tiffany Higgins, and Aeneas stares into her helmet, and Fred Marchant, The Looking House: Poems, Diesel, A Bookstore, 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, 3:00 (510/653-9965, dieselbookstore.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
Dan Bellm's latest book of poems, his third, is Practice. Alicia Ostriker says, "Reading Dan Bellm's poems, I think of Auden saying, 'In the deserts of the heart / Let the healing fountain start.' I am in awe of how Dan Bellm's poems perform a dance with and against Holy Scripture." His first collection was One Hand on the Wheel, the first volume of Heyday's California Poetry Series. His second collection, Buried Treasure, won the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Prize and the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay DiCastagnola Award.

Tiffany Higgins's first book of poems, and Aeneas stares into her helmet, won the 2008 Carolina Wren Press Poetry Contest; Patrick Herron says of it, "Tiffany Higgins' anachronistic and recast hero is one brilliantly charged nexus of exploitation and war; she is captured, tortured, and released as a sequence of heartbreaking lyrics." She is also a translator and a critic.

Fred Marchant's newest book is The Looking House: Poems; The Journal says, "To my mind, what distinguishes Marchant's work is his willingness to take a hard look at human suffering while maintaining his unflinching, delicate tone." Marchant, who served during the Vietnam War, was one of the first marine officers ever to be honorably discharged as a conscientious objector. He has published many books of poems, including Full Moon Boat, and he is the editor of Another World Instead: The Early Poems of William Stafford, 1937–1947, which includes Stafford's poems as a conscientious objector during World War II.