Maxine Chernoff and Rusty Morrison

12 APRIL 2012 — thursday

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Maxine Chernoff, Without, and Rusty Morrison, After Urgency: Poems, 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
Maxine Chernoff's new book of poems is Without. Marjorie Perloff says of this elegiac collection, "The protagonist of these fifty brilliantly condensed elliptical poems…is never without. . .an unfailing tact—a dazzling inventiveness that distances the pain and transforms it into verbal pleasure." She is the author of six novels and nine books of poetry, including To Be Read in the Dark, The Turning, and Among the Names. She is the co-editor of the literary journal New American Writing. Rusty Morrison's new book of poems is After Urgency: Poems, winner of the Dorset Prize selected by Jane Hirshfield, who says, "The question underlying After Urgency's pages is how to go on…and each poem posits its own hard-wrestled, multiplying answer of gorgeous continuance. Rusty Morrison instantiates idea and feeling in ways unlike any other poet now writing." Morrison's first collection, Whethering, won the Colorado Prize for Poetry; her second, the true keeps calm biding its story, won the DiCastagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, was published through a Sawtooth Poetry Prize from Ahsahta Press, and went on to win a James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets and the Northern California Book Award for Poetry. She is co-publisher of Omnidawn Press out of Richmond, California.