Jan Beatty. Photo by Beth Kukucka.

Jan Beatty, Peter Kline, C. Dale Young

11 NOVEMBER 2021 — thursday

Poetry Flash presents a virtual reading by poets Jan Beatty, American Bastard: A Memoir and The Body Wars: Poems, Peter Kline, Mirrorforms, and C. Dale Young, Prometeo, online via Zoom, free, 7:00 pm PST (Register to attend: please click here; you will receive an email with a link to join the reading)


Please join us for a Poetry Flash virtual reading on Thursday, November 11 at 7:00 pm PST! We are excited to bring you this rare gathering of three compelling poets via Zoom. To register for this reading, please click on the link in the calendar listing above. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the event. Thank you for continuing to support Poetry Flash and our reading series during these unprecedented times.

This reading is co-sponsored by Moe's Books in Berkeley; the featured books are available at bookshop.org/lists/poetry-flash-readings.

MORE ABOUT THE READERS

Jan Beatty's new book is American Bastard, winner of the Red Hen Press Nonfiction Award 2021. A lyrical inquiry into the experience of being a bastard in America, it travels across literal continents—and continents of desire—as Beatty finds her birthfather, a Canadian hockey player who's won three Stanley Cups, and her birthmother, a working-class woman from Pittsburgh. Issues of class and struggle run throughout the memoir. Her sixth book is The Body Wars: Poems, University of Pittsburgh Press. Naomi Shihab Nye said in The New York Times: "Jan Beatty's new poems…shimmer with luminous connection, travel a big life and grand map of encounters." Beatty's previous books include Jackknife: New and Collected Poems, winner of the Paterson Prize. Maria Mazziotti Gillan said, "Jackknife is a book that secures Jan's place in American literature as one of the fiercest and bravest poets writing today." Her work has appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Poetry, BuzzFeed, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere.

Peter Kline's Mirrorforms is a daring, experimental collection of poems in which language reaches its most pressurized state. Kline has invented a new poetic form, the mirrorform, which he uses with musical verve to essentialize thought and intensify feeling. Bruce Snider says, "…Risky and formally inventive, playful yet rigorous, these poems work like mirrors facing one another; they give a sense of the infinite—the endless joys, losses, and mysteries that make our world." A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, Peter Klein has also received residency fellowships from the Amy Clampitt House, James Merrill House, Artsmith Orcas Island, and more. His previous book is Deviants; his poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry, Tin House, and many other journals, as well as Best New Poets, Verse Daily website, and the Random House anthology of metrical poetry, Measure for Measure. He teaches writing at the University of San Francisco and in Stanford University's Master of Liberal Arts Program.

C. Dale Young's new book is Prometeo, from Four Way Books. Ilya Kaminsky says, "Heartbreaking and beautiful is Prometeo, a book so eloquent the heart stops but refuses to stop reading. These are glorious poems in memoriam for friends, family members, patients. 'I have written too many elegies,' the poet says, 'the living have become jealous of the amount I have written for the dead.' Indeed, fellow poets must be jealous of this book's fearless spirit, of its music." C. Dale Young practices medicine full-time. He is also the author of a novel in stories, The Affliction, and four previous collections of poetry. He is a recipient of fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, National Endowment for the Arts, Guggenheim Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and more. His poetry and short fiction have appeared in many anthologies and magazines, including Best American Poetry, Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation, American Poetry Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, and Poetry.