2023 Poetry Flash Reading Series

Poetry Flash readings readings that are live and in person take place at Moe's Books, Berkeley, and at East Bay Booksellers, Oakland. Due to shelter-in-place and the pandemic, the Poetry Flash Reading Series has become a virtual series as of August 9, 2020, presented online until further notice. To find out more about the Poetry Flash Reading Series, please email editor@poetryflash.org. ASL interpreters for the deaf and hearing impaired may be requested with at least one week's notice, email editor@poetryflash.org. Our bookstore venues are wheelchair accessible. Read more about the series on the Poetry Flash Reading Series page.

22 JANUARY 2023 — sunday

Joan Baranow and Tayve Neese

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Joan Baranow, A Slight Thing, Happiness, and Tayve Neese, evolution psalms, online via Zoom, free, 3:00 pm PST (Register to attend: please click here; you will receive an email with a link to join the reading)

Featured books for this event are available at bookshop.org/shop/poetryflash

MORE ABOUT THE READERS
Joan Baranow's new book is A Slight Thing, Happiness. Erin Rodoni says, "From the intricate intimacies of laparoscopic surgery to the strangely sensual seascape of a petri dish, Baranow's lush, incisive imagery reveals a scarred yet serene internal garden of organs and cells. From hospital beds to IVs and incubators, from the underdeveloped lungs of a preemie to the bruising love of early motherhood, these poems soothe and croon and bloom toward the messier, wilder garden that is the family and the world we live in." Baranow's previous books are Still You: Poems of Illness and Healing, In the Next Life, Living Apart, and Morning: Three Poems. Her poetry has appeared in the Gettysburg Review, The Paris Review, Poetry East, JAMA, Feminist Studies, and other magazines. A fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and member of the Community of Writers, she has won individual artists fellowships in poetry from the Marin Arts Council, and the Ohio Arts Council. She founded and teaches in the Low-Residency MFA program in Creative Writing at Dominican University of California.

Tayve Neese's new book is evolution psalms. Irena Mashinski says, "Tayve Neese's laconic, dynamic, rhythmically impeccable poems evolve with the determination of banyan tree roots, bound only by the mesmerizing pulse of metamorphosis—skeletal, igneous, stellar, emotional. Their tapestry is filled with scale-defying wonders—a horseshoe crab, a feather, or a molecule of salt—relying on each other for space to coil around, to fork through, to nest in; representing love itself in its incessant earthly movement." Her previous collections are Blood to Fruit and Hooved (audio chapbook). Locust is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry in Ireland. Her work has appeared in Fourteen Hills, The Paris Review (online edition), and Pedestal Magazine. Her poetry has been nominated for a 2021 Pushcart Prize with Black Lawrence Press. She has edited over twenty-five books, including poetry collections, novels, chapbooks, and memoirs, and is the Executive Editor and co-founder of Trio House Press. She is also the founder and primary editor of The Banyan Review.

5 FEBRUARY 2023 — sunday

Beverly Burch and Robert Thomas

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Beverly Burch, Leave Me a Little Want, and Robert Thomas, Sonnets with Two Torches and One Cliff, in person, 2727 California Street, between Ward and Stuart Streets, Berkeley, free, 3:00 pm PST (poetryflash.org).


MORE ABOUT THE READERS
Beverly Burch's new poetry book is Leave Me a Little Want. Julia Levine says, "I love this book and its urgent attention to language and form in the "treacherous province" of our current times. Burch never turns away from the coexistence of the beautiful and the bloody, the tedious and the risky, and so I not only trust her, but feel jolted awake." Beverly Burch's previous books are Latter Days of Eve, How a Mirage Works, and Sweet to Burn. Her poetry has appeared in 32 Poems, Gulf Coast, Denver Quarterly, Southern Review, Los Angeles Review, New England Review and other magazines. She also has two psychoanalytic books on women's sexual and gender relations, On Intimate Terms and Other Women.

Robert Thomas's new poetry collection is Sonnets with Two Torches and One Cliff. Kim Addonizio says, "A formally constrained poem that brilliantly manages to sound anything but. A paean to longing, to the mysteries of love and time and distance, 'Negligee and Hatchet,' as its title suggests, is full of contraries and surprises—swamp pop and Mick Jagger, grotto and tomb, Aphrodite and caramel corn…the poet's language turns and dazzles with every line." His previous books are Bridge, a novella, winner of the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Fiction; Door to Door, selected by Yusef Komunyakaa for the Poets Out Loud Prize; and Dragging the Lake. His poetry has appeared in The Yale Review, The Southern Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Atlantic, and other magazines. He also received a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Pushcart Prize.

19 FEBRUARY 2023 — sunday

David Alpaugh and Connie Post

Poetry Flash presents a reading from new books by David Alpaugh, Seeing The There There, and Connie Post, Between Twilight, online via Zoom, free, 3:00 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 virtual reading on Sunday, February 19 at 3:00 pm PST. We are excited to bring you this event 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 meeting. Thank you for continuing to support Poetry Flash and our reading series.

Connie Post's new book can be purchased at bookshop.org/shop/poetryflash. David Alpaugh's new book is available at https://www.wordgalaxy.com/books/david-alpaugh-seeing-the-there-there-poems.

MORE ABOUT THE READERS
David Alpaugh's new collection is Seeing The There There. Susan Terris says, "simply amazing," a "unique, one-of-a-kind book" "you will want to own…read…savor." Alpaugh fuses comic and serious poetry with more than one-hundred color photos, paintings and graphic images that include a beached whale, a three-legged cat, a martini with olives, a grief-stricken Jack-O-Lantern, John Donne's flea, Duchamp's famous bidet, and a ham sandwich. Each poem, Marvin R. Hiemstra writes "finds us in a sui generis universe" with "surprising rhymes surfing on fresh insight." Alpaugh's previous collection Spooky Action at a Distance was published by Word Galaxy in 2020. Counterpoint, 1994 Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize-winner from Story Line Press, was reprinted in 2021. His work is included in the anthology California Poetry from the Gold Rush to the Present, edited by Dana Gioia, and Alpaugh has been a finalist for Poet Laureate of California.

Connie Post's new poetry book is Between Twilight, from New York Quarterly Books. Diane Seuss says "This honest voice, this exiled voice, comes through in poems that strike me as prayer. They seek mercy, not so much from a deity but from the world, and most significantly, from herself." Connie Post delves deep into the difficult journeys of everyday life and intersects those with the difficult maps of the past. There are "atrocities in the body" and many ways a person can falter, fall or rise from "the hue of an unseen self." Post served as the first Poet Laureate of Livermore, California. Her previous full-length collections include Floodwater, Lyrebird Award-winner, and Prime Meridian, named a distinguished favorite in the Independent Book Awards. Her awards include the Crab Creek Review Poetry Award and Caesura Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies including Calyx, 2River, Cold Mountain Review, The American Journal of Poetry, River Styx, Slipstream, and Verse Daily.

26 FEBRUARY 2023 — sunday

Genny Lim, Maya Khosla, Chris Olander, John Curl

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Genny Lim Kra!, Maya Khosla All the Fires of Wind and Light, Chris Olander, River Light, John Curl, Rainbow Weather, online, via Zoom, free, 3:00 pm PST (Register to attend: please click here; you will receive an email with a link to join the reading)


Featured books for this event will be available at: bookshop.org/shop/poetryflash. Genny Lim's recent collection is available at www.asiabookcenter.com/store/p1403/KRA!.html.

MORE ABOUT THE READERS
These four dynamic poets were all featured readers at last fall's in-person Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival in Berkeley, California.

Genny Lim's recent book is Kra!. Her previous collections are Paper Gods and Rebels, Child of War, and Winter Place, among others. Her work appears in The Politics of Life: Four Plays by Asian American Women, Unbroken Thread: Anthology of Plays by Asian American Women, Oxford Book of Women's Writings in the United States, and Island: Poetry and the History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island. Genny Lim is a recipient of the 1981 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, and a Bay Guardian Goldie for Local Discovery 1991. She is currently the San Francisco Jazz Poet Laureate (2017-present).

Maya Khosla's new collection is All the Fires of Wind and Light. Lucille Lang Days says, "Khosla presents climate change and endangered species with precise images and biological accuracy. Fire ecology, a widely misunderstood field, is a central theme. In this collection there is anticipation of catastrophe, but there is also hope: 'The living are awake / to the profusion soon to follow. / They will grow with the diligence / of all known colors / unfolding….'" Also a wildlife biologist and filmmaker, Maya Khosla's previous collections are Keel Bone, and Heart of the Tearing. Her work appears in the Chicago Quarterly Review, Canary: A Literary Journal of the Environmental Crisis, Munyori Literary Journal, and World Literature Today. She was Sonoma County Poet Laureate 2018–2020.

Chris Olander's poetry collection is River Light. Kirk Lumpkin says, "What has always impressed me about Chris Olander's poetry is how present, how kinetically alive the energies of Nature (birds, oaks, rivers, etc.) are in it and of how the words dance in the breath and sinew of it." Olander has published in many anthologies and magazines. He is a founding director of Poet's Playhouse in Nevada City (1988-89) and of the Nevada City Poetry Series of Grass Valley. He served as Poet Laureate of Nevada County, 2019-21. He leads the annual Strawberry Creek Walk for the Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival.

John Curl's new poetry book is Rainbow Weather: Poems for Environmental Healing. Kim Shuck says, "The poems in Rainbow Weather challenge the reader to release expectation and received hierarchies and in exchange, to retrieve wonder. Current circumstances being what they are, the treatment for collective malaise is probably complicated, a combination of things with many moving parts, but somewhere in that combination there is certainly space for the calm, understanding observations in this poetry collection." His previous collections include Yoga Sutras of Fidel Castro, Revolutionary Alchemy, and Scorched Birth. His historical writings include Indigenous Peoples Day, and For All the People. He is co-editor of the recent anthology, Storm Warning: Poets for the Planet Building Socialism.

19 MARCH 2023 — sunday

Dean Rader and Meryl Natchez

Poetry Flash presents a reading and a conversation in poems by Meryl Natchez, Catwalk, and Dean Rader, Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry, in person, Art House Gallery & Cultural Center, 2905 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, two blocks north of Ashby BART, free, 3:00 pm PDT (poetryflash.org).

Featured books for this event will be available at the event. Dean Rader's are also available at bookshop.org/shop/poetryflash.

MORE ABOUT THE READERS
"In this reading and conversation in poems, the poets will read poems that seem to speak to each other's work—from tales of the inimitable Frog and Toad children's books, the scenes from Reservoir Dogs, to the standard territory of love, sex, death and most everything else, except taxes."

Meryl Natchez's fourth book, Catwalk, received an Indie Best Book 2020 Award from Kirkus Reviews. Jericho Brown says, "Meryl Natchez casts the kind of spells that amount to a more precise definition for the "changing same" of what lyric poetry really is. Yes, these poems show a gift for formal dexterity with haibuns and cinquains and nonce verse, but what I love about them is how much of the world—how much of a life—Natchez conjures in the space of a few lines. From the biology of earthworms to the pitfalls of a forty-year love affair, there is no place this poetry won't touch." Meryl Natchez's work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, LA Review of Books, Hudson Review, Poetry Northwest, Literary Matters, The American Journal of Poetry, Tupelo Quarterly, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere. For more see www.merylnatchez.com.

Dean Rader's most recent poetry collection is Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry, a finalist for the Northern California Book Award and the Oklahoma Book Award. ZYZZYVA wrote of it, "By writing honestly about the difficulties of self-representation, Rader represents himself as a writer who cares deeply about his audience and his craft." His previous collection, Works & Days, won the T.S Eliot Prize. Eric Weinstein wrote of it, "his poems ask the difficult questions in accessible ways, ways rendered all the more effective via wry humor and an eye for the darkly poignant." Writer, scholar, and critic as well as a poet, Dean Rader also writes about Indigenous studies, modern and contemporary art, and visual culture. He is a professor at the University of San Francisco and a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry.