John Shoptaw

John Shoptaw and Armen Davoudian

10 NOVEMBER 2024 — sunday

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading featuring Armen Davoudian, The Palace of Forty Pillars, and John Shoptaw, Near-Earth Object, 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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Featured books for this reading will be available for signing at the event and at bookshop.org/shop/poetryflash. This event will be posted on the Poetry Flash YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/channel/UClwdR-uPFNz7XxbBbLcnoEA.

MORE ABOUT THE READERS
Armen Davoudian's debut poetry collection is The Palace of Forty Pillars. Peter Balakian says, "Armen Davoudian transforms his Iranian childhood with Proustian sensuality. His images embody a psychological web of forces that shape the self as it accrues the complexities of experience. His cosmopolitan voice spans time and space and literary traditions. The echo chamber of his language will stay with you." Davoudian's chapbook, Swan Song, won the Frost Place Competition. He's also translator, from the Persian, of Hopscotch by Fatemeh Shams. His poems and translations from Persian have appeared in AGNI, The Sewanee Review, Narrative, Poetry magazine, Hopkins Review, Yale Review, and elsewhere. He grew up in Isfahan, Iran, and is a PhD candidate in English at Stanford University.
John Shoptaw's new book of poems is Near-Earth Object, with a Foreword by Jenny Odell. David Baker says, "Shoptaw's poetry is part memory and part typology, as he sorts the 'blue springs' from the 'apple moonshine,' shaping his work into quantitative syllabics (à la Marianne Moore) or, by turns, into natural-flowing free verse. His deeper imperative, though—spiritual, aesthetic, and cultural—is to speak on behalf of a bruised ecosystem.…" Shoptaw's previous books and works include Times Beach, winner of the Notre Dame Book Review Book Prize and the Northern California Book Award; On the Outside Looking Out: John Ashbery's Poetry; and Our American Cousin, an opera libretto. His writing has appeared in Poetry Magazine, Arion, Kenyon Review, The New Yorker, Poetry, and elsewhere. He teaches in the UC Berkeley English Department.