J. David Cummings

J. David Cummings and Esther Kamkar

5 MARCH 2015 — thursday

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by J. David Cummings and Esther Kamkar, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org, wheelchair accessible, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com)

MORE ABOUT THE READERS
J. David Cummings's debut collection, Tancho, won the 2013 Snyder Award from Ashland Poetry Press, selected by Alicia Suskin Ostriker, who says, "This is a book that needed to be written and needs to be read. Its account of terrible beauty is itself beautiful, speaking of 'hope and despair, the promise of each to other.' Nagasaki, Hiroshima, 'ruined human beings,' a peace park, a sounding bell, a thousand paper cranes." J. David Cummings resigned his position as a theoretical physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1973 and vowed to end his work in nuclear weapons. He visited Japan in the early 1990s and visited the Hiroshima Memorial Peace Park. Tancho, his book-length meditation on the U.S. nuclear bombing of Japan, whose composition took him almost two decades, is the result.
Esther Kamkar has published two collections of poetry, Hummingbird Conditions, a letterpress limited edition, and the chapbook A Leopard in My Pocket. John Waterman says, "Esther Kamkar's poetry is as changing as the ocean, as passionate as a pomegranate tree in blossom, as deep and clear as a pool in a mountain stream." Born in Tehran, Iran, she has lived in the USA since 1973. Published in many literary journals, her poetry has been anthologized in The Forbidden: Poems from Iran and its Exiles and Let Me Tell You Where I've Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora.