Poetry Readings Times Four
Saturday-Sunday-Monday

Saturday, September 10 – 5 pm

a poet from the neighborhood,
and one from farther out

Jane Rice & Suzanne Sigafoos

Jane Rice is a neighborhood gal, but more importantly a serious poet of long experience.  She will read from her new chapbook,  The Truth About the World. 

Jane notes, “In all my poems I seek to create a tension between coincidence and the expectation of sequence. The mind yearns to find meaning in the connections of things. Yet we ascribe meaning only to a fraction of the coincidences that surround us. ”

A letterpress edition of Jane’s previous collection, Portrait Sitters, a painterly sequence of likenesses of Montparnasse artists during the inter-war period, was published by Propolis Press in 2007, and in the same year her chapbook Line Drawings was a finalist in the New York Center for Book Arts chapbook competition. Crayfish Tale, a book-length manuscript, was a finalist in the Colorado Prize for Poetry competition in 2005.

“Like any excellent portraitist, she exposes her subjects’ emotional landscapes, but she also goes beyond the frame of the individual to evoke an entire time and place.” — Cole Swenson.

Suzanne Sigafoos hails from Portland, where she has lived since leaving the Bay Area in 1999. There, she has participated in numerous workshops with the Mountain Writers Series as well as a writing retreat at Port Townsend’s Centrum with Dorianne Laux, and she co-founded the River Rock Writers Group in 2002.  Suzanne has been writing poetry in earnest since her first poetry workshop at U.C. Berkeley Extension in 1997.  Her new chapbook, Held in the Weave is her first published collection of poems.

“These honed poems, messages to the living, offer the reader a door to the quiet deep, from which we ourselves return, deepened and gratefully aware of the power of song in this singing collection.” — Judith Montgomery

 

 Saturday, September 10 – 7 pm

¿Le gusta este jardín, que es suyo?
¡Evite que sus hijos lo destruyan!

Do you like this garden, which is yours?
Make sure your children don’t destroy it!
-Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

Polis: Este Jardin
Summer 2011 Issue
West Coast Release Reading

A reading by contributors, including Lewis Ellingham, Christina Fisher, Carrie Hunter, Nicholas James Whittington and co-editor Zachary Martin.

If this were a proper magazine… but we are not a proper magazine, we are self funded zine with enough literary pretension to fuel a fourth US military quagmire in some Middle Eastern country you haven’t heard anything in the news about since Reagan was president. While you are waiting eagerly for the next Polis to arrive you might… well, never mind, no need to wait.  It is here.  Come hear.

 

Sunday, September 11 – 2:30 pm

Black Radish Poets Collective

Carrie Hunter
Dana Teen Lomax
James Maughn
Jill Stengel

Carrie Hunter received her MFA/MA in the now defunct Poetics program at New College of California, and edits the small chapbook press, ypolita press. She has several chapbooks, including Vorticells (Cy Gist Press), Kine(sta)sis (Dusie), The Unicorns (Dusie), A Musics (Arrow as Aarow), and Diary(Dusie). She lives in San Francisco. Her first full-length book, The Incompossible, is just out from Black Radish.

James Maughn lives in Santa Cruz, CA, where he co-edits the literary arts journal Ping Pong for the Henry Miller Memorial Library. He also coordinates A New Cadence Poetry Series out of the Felix Kulpa Gallery in Santa Cruz.  His first book, Kata, was published by BlazeVOX Books in 2008. His new book from Black Radish is The Arakaki Permutatons.

Dana Teen Lomax hails from San Quentin and has some of the following books to her credit: Disclosure (Black Radish Books, 2011), Letters To Poets: Conversations about Poetics, Politics, and Community (Saturnalia Books, 2008), Curren¢y (Palm Press, 2006); plus chapbooks Disclosure (UBU Editions, 2010), Rx (Dusie Press, 2010), from Disclosure (Dusie Press, 2009), Room (a+bend, 1999). Nearly full disclosure has been made, though we haven’t mentioned her appearance in numerous anthologies and literary journals.

Jill Stengel is the publisher of a+bend press, and parent of three young children. Formerly of San Francisco and Los Angeles, she now resides with her family in Davis, CA. Several of her serial poems have appeared in chapbook form: cartography (1999, WOOD); History, Possibilities : (1999, a+bend press); ladies with babies (2003, Boog); lagniappe (2008, Nous-Zot Press, Dusie Kollektiv); late may (2007, Dusie); may(be) (2006, Dusie); and I would open (Ypolita); and wreath (Texfiles). She has a new collection out (or perhaps it’s forthcoming, we can’t be sure) from none other than… Black Radish Books!

 

Monday, September 12th, 7:00 pm

Unsolicited Poems

David Rowe & Marc Olmstead

A native of Worcester, Mass., David Rowe was educated at Swarthmore. His poems have appeared in the Cortland Review, the North American Review, Big Bridge, Dorado, Solid Quarter, Exquisite Corpse, YAWP, & in the anthology, the Maple Leaf Rag. A poet equally of the stage & the page, David has read his poetry on the Moe Green Poetry Show & WWOZ, & at countless venues both in the States & abroad. His first full-length book, just out from Verna Press (New Orleans), is Unsolicited Poems.

Allen Ginsberg said “Marc Olmsted inherited Burroughs’ scientific nerve & Kerouac’s movie-minded line nailed down with gold eyebeam in San Francisco.” Olmsted has appeared in City Lights Journal, New Directions in Prose & Poetry, The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, Processed World and a variety of small presses. His work includes two books, Mlky Desire (Subterranean Press, 1991) and Resume (Inevitable Press, 1998). He has also made two short films, Burroughs on Bowery, a portrait of the Naked Lunch author, and American Mutant, with Burroughs, Ginsberg & Timothy Leary.