
Bruce Isaacson
Paul Corman-Roberts and Bruce Isaacson
25 SEPTEMBER 2025 — thursday
Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Bruce Isaacson, Porpoisefully Wrong, and Paul Corman-Roberts, Bone Moon Palace, Art House Gallery & Cultural Center, 2905 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, two blocks north of Ashby BART, refreshments, free, 7:00 pm PDT (poetryflash.org).
Thank you for continuing to support Poetry Flash and our reading series. Paul Corman-Roberts featured book will be available at the event and at bookshop.org/shop/poetryflash. Bruce Isaacson's books are available at www.Zeigeist-Press.com. This event will be posted on the Poetry Flash YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/channel/UClwdR-uPFNz7XxbBbLcnoEA.
MORE ABOUT THE READERS
Paul Corman-Roberts is the co-founder of Collapse Press. His most recent books are 19th Street Station Volume 2, The Sincere, and Bone Moon Palace, Black Lawrence Press, a full-length poetry collection nominated for the CLMP Firecracker Awards. Genny Lim, San Francisco Poet Laureate, says of it, "These verses leave no slack. Gritty, rude, and raw to the bone, they express the political-human angst and turmoil of our combustible city and times, bursting forth, like an angry spigot, its elegy of love, sex and pain, contradictions and visions." He is a founder and organizer of the Beast Crawl Lit Festival in Oakland, California, and has taught workshops for the San Francisco Creative Writing Institute. He sometimes fills in as a drummer for the U.S. Ghostal Service, The Jennifer Blowdryer Band, and the Poznansky Sisters.
Bruce Isaacson's new book of poems is Porpoisefully Wrong. His previous books include Anthems of the Damned, in which the poet shows how it feels "to be human in an age of the ghosted soul," and Leningrad to Las Vegas; his novel is Vegas Dirt. He says of it, "These are human stories of the Great Recession—the salesman with two families, the mogul in misery, the erotic dancer who took the stage name America." Richard Silberg wrote in Poetry Flash, Isaacson "uses 'pop' language and images from news media, advertising, chews it up and spits it back, for subversion, and no one is slicker or deadlier at that than Isaacson…the ideal poetic guerrilla…a master of irony, the offbeat metaphor, poems that keep on ticking on the mind after they end in a sudden silence." Bruce Isaacson was a surprise finalist in the inaugural Nuyorican Poetry Slam; in San Francisco he was a coordinator of the Café Babar readings, part of an infamous SF Spoken Word resurgence. Bruce Isaacson was the first Poet Laureate of Clark County, Nevada, which includes Las Vegas. He's publisher of Zeitgeist Press, with over 150 poetry titles to date.

