Joan Aleshire, Stephanie Brown and Martha Rhodes

23 SEPTEMBER 2012 — sunday

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Joan Aleshire, Stephanie Brown, and Martha Rhodes, wheelchair accessible, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org, Diesel, A Bookstore, 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, 3:00 (510/653-9965, dieselbookstore.com)

More about the readers
Joan Aleshire’s new book of poems is Happily. Stephen Dobyns says of it, “In these graceful, highly detailed poems, Aleshire investigates a privileged childhood and young adulthood of the 1940s and 50s, a time so different from our own as to be truly from another world.…Aleshire’s poems are as much sound as sense, and together they don’t talk so much about a vanished time as recreate it with all its many levels of actuality and gradations of emotions.”
Stephanie Brown’s latest book book of poems is Domestic Interior. Tony Hoagland says, “Stephanie Brown is one of my favorite poets. There’s something lethally, courageously blunt in her poems.…Her star is stationed somewhere in the quadrant of Sylvia Plath and Anne Carson, and it throbs with its own distinctive human brightness.” Her first collection was Allegory of the Supermarket, and her work has been anthologized in American Poetry: The Next Generation, Body Electric: Twenty-five Years of America’s Best Poetry, and in four editions of The Best American Poetry.
Martha Rhodes’s new book is The Beds. Cate Marvin says, “I can assure you that Martha Rhodes’ unflinching manner in The Beds will make you flinch…what’s so brilliant about this book is how steadfastly it refuses closure. These poems, grim and wise, never arrive in the guise of the Good Girl. And for that brand of honesty, I am most grateful.” Her previous collections are At the Gate, Perfect Disappearance, which won the Green Rose Prize, and Mother Quiet. She is Director of Four Way Books.