Anders Carlson-Wee

Anders Carlson-Wee and Francesca Bell

19 NOVEMBER 2023 — sunday

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Anders Carlson-Wee, Disease of Kings, and Marin County Poet Laureate, Francesca Bell, What Small Sound, Art House Gallery & Cultural Center, 2905 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, two blocks north of Ashby BART, refreshments, free, 3:00 pm PST (poetryflash.org).

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MORE ABOUT THE READERS

Francesca Bell's new poetry collection is What Small Sound. Sarah Kain Gutowski says, "…What Small Sound entreats us to value the terror, sorrow, and hardship in life as much as its moments of beauty and love and sensuousness. As readers, the poet's appeal to us is easier to accept, and makes more sense because she leads by example: "Oh world," Bell sings plaintively in "After the Hearing Test," "leave me slowly. / Let me dally over each diminishing return." Her previous collections include Bright Stain, finalist for the Washington State Book Award and Julie Suk Award, and Whoever Drowned Here, a collection of poems by Max Sessner that she translated from the German. Her writing appears in many magazines including Los Angeles Review of Books, New Ohio Review, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, and Rattle. Her translations appear in Mid-American Review, The Massachusetts Review, New England Review, River Styx, and elsewhere. She is Marin County Poet Laureate and translation editor at Los Angeles Review.

Anders Carlson-Wee's new book is Disease of Kings. Patrick Phillips says, "Disease of Kings is a harrowing dive into late-empire America, with its underworld of scroungers and squirrelers, dumpster-chefs and honest thieves, who have turned their backs on the gluttony of the Anthropocene. Again and again, these beautiful poems 'sing what we can't say,' and dare to imagine a new life, fashioned from the wreckage of this one." His previous collections include, The Low Passions, a New York Public Library Book Group Selection, and Dynamite, winner of the Frost Place Chapbook Prize. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, Harvard Review, American Poetry Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Anders Carlson-Wee is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Poets & Writers, Camargo Foundation, Bread Loaf, Sewanee, and Napa Valley Writers' Conference. He is the winner of the Poetry International Prize, and lives in Los Angeles.