Camille Norton, Barbara Swift Brauer, Maya Khosla

7 APRIL 2019 — sunday

Poetry Flash presents a Sixteen Rivers Press book launch and reading by Barbara Swift Brauer, Rain, Like a Thief, Maya Khosla, All the Fires of Wind and Light, and Camille Norton, A Folio for the Dark, East Bay Booksellers, 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, wheelchair accessible, 3:00 (510/653-9965, ebbooksellers.com)


MORE ABOUT THE READERS
Three poets launch and read from their new Sixteen Rivers Press books! Barbara Swift Brauer's new book of poems is Rain, Like a Thief, Ellery Akers says, "Barbara Swift Brauer is a poet of wonderful transparency and economy, and evokes the delights of ordinary life as well as the passage of time." Her first collection, At Ease in the Borrowed World, was published by Sixteen Rivers in 2013. A freelance writer, she co-authored the nonfiction book Witness: The Artist's Vision in "The Face of AIDS," with portrait artist Lisa Kirk.
Maya Khosla's new collection is All the Fires of Wind and Light. Pattiann Rogers says, "The tone and stance of the lyrical language bestow on each particular—whether commonplace or unique, pitiful or rapturous, insect-tiny or sky-wide—an aura of the miraculous, each being, each element equally mighty in itself and essential to the whole." Her first book, Keel Bone, won the Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize. The current Poet Laureate of Sonoma County, she is also a wildlife biologist and a filmmaker. Her recent film is Searching for the Gold Spot: The Wild After the Wildfire. Her film and fieldwork show that the natural environment, if left undisturbed, can recover from even the most devastating fires, especially in northern California, and her poetry is often inspired by her research.
Camille Norton's new book of poems is A Folio for the Dark, in which she "asks us to contemplate the power of reading and writing in an open-source universe in which books as physical objects are disappearing." Julia B. Levine says, "In her brilliant second collection, Camille Norton creates a deep and lush interior world where she is both reader and writer, young girl and sensual adult, herself and other. In these poems, which are as mysterious, brutal, and beautiful as truth, Norton writes her way into the lives of those she has read: Poe, Thomas Jefferson, Gertrude Stein, a Confederate prisoner, Herman Melville's whale, and the Old Testament's Jonah…there emerges an alchemical voice of the multiple worlds that inhabit Norton's dynamic mind." Her first collection, Corruption, was a National Poetry Series winner. She has worked collaboratively with artists and composers since the early 1990's when she co-edited Resurgent: New Writing by Women, an anthology of experimental writing by women in literature, film, and the visual arts. Her poem "The Prison Diary of Bartlett Yancey Malone" was published in The Best American Poetry 2010.