Mary Mackey

Mary Mackey and Susan Kelly-DeWitt

18 MAY 2025 — sunday

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading featuring Susan Kelly-DeWitt, Frangible Operas, and Mary Mackey, In This Burning World: Poems of Love and Apocalypse, Art House Gallery & Cultural Center, 2905 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, two blocks north of Ashby BART, refreshments, free, 3:00 pm PDT (poetryflash.org).


Thank you for continuing to support Poetry Flash and our reading series. The featured books 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

Susan Kelly-DeWitt's new poetry collection is Frangible Operas. William O'Daly says, "…Susan Kelly-DeWitt is a seer at the height of her formidable artistic powers, gathering parallel realities, fractured light, music of blue flowers, syllables of leaves, stars fallen in nets we cast, and the unseen seeds of our imaginations, such that with every vulnerable song we experience the wholeness of what's sacred—grief, joy, love, hope in wonder. These exquisite poems, their stunning imagery, expansive and focused, witness "the wilderness inside us," even as they "pulse with the energy of the soul's primal blast." A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, her previous collections include Gatherer's Alphabet, Gravitational Tug, Spider Season, The Fortunate Islands, small press and online collections. She was a reviewer for Library Journal, editor-in-chief of the online journal Perihelion, Sacramento Poetry Center Program Director, a Poet in the Schools and a Poet in the Prisons, and a blogger for Coal Hill Review. She is a member of the National Book Critics Circle, Northern California Book Reviewers Association, and a contributing editor for Poetry Flash. She is also an exhibiting visual artist and lives in Sacramento.
Mary Mackey's new poetry collection is In This Burning World: Poems of Love and Apocalypse. D. Nurkse says, "…a visionary epic that turns devastatingly intimate. William Blake is here as is Hiroshima, but the prophetic arc is Mary Mackey's alone. How do we negotiate an apocalypse when the enemy is the self, when we have known for centuries where our path leads?…Her poems are invested with the sacred energy of the natural world whose destruction she can't endure. Her book is incandescent. You won't forget it." Mary Mackey's previous books include Creativity: Where Poems Begin. She is the author of numerous collections including The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams: New and Selected Poems, 1974 to 2018, winner of 2019 Eric Hoffer Award for Best Book Published by a Small Press, Sugar Zone, winner of a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award, and Travelers With No Ticket Home. She is also the author of fourteen novels including The New York Times bestseller A Grand Passion, The Village of Bones: Sabalah's Tale, and Widow's War. She is past president of PEN West, a Fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Professor Emerita of California State University, Sacramento.