Alicia Suskin Ostriker and Philip Memmer

15 JULY 2012 — sunday

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Alicia Suskin Ostriker and Philip Memmer, 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
Alicia Suskin Ostriker's new book of poems is The Book of Life, Selected Jewish Poems, 1979-2011. Ilya Kaminsky calls it, "A Song of Songs, which is not Solomon's but Alicia Ostriker's. A great ages-old hymn to life, to flesh, to memory, is revised again on these pages, with gusto, with passion, with clarity, with eros, with grief." An incisive critic and a major American poet, she has published fourteen books of poems including The Book of Seventy, The Mother/ Child Papers, No Heaven, the volcano sequence, and The Little Space: Poems Selected and New, 1968-1998. She has also published a number of prose books, on the Bible and on contemporary literature. Among her honors are the William Carlos Williams Award, the San Francisco State Poetry Center Award, the National Jewish Book Award; she has twice been a finalist for the National Book Award.
Philip Memmer's new book of poems is The Storehouses of the Snow. Alicia Ostriker says, "Bitter and brilliant, ardent and persistent, The Storehouses of the Snow is a book to read-no fooling-alongside the Book of Job. Every poem here made me catch my breath in astonishment at Philip Memmer's bold imagination and the sacred relentlessness of his quest." His previous three books include Lucifer A Hagiography, winner of the 2008 Idaho Prize for Poetry; Threat of Pleasure, winner of the Adirondack Literary Award for Poetry; and Sweetheart, Baby, Darling.