Jorge Argueta and Jerry Ferraz share the featured slots on tonight’s reading — which coincidentally is Jerry’s birthday! Jerry has been hosting our reading series for more than a dozen years, and was on the first bill of poets we ever presented here.  He’s a native son of the city, and has been wandering the streets with his pint sized guitars for decades, performing enigmatic yet epic song-poems and taking in the city around us.  Surely, his heritage comes from the bardic and troubadour traditions of time gone by. Jorge has had a long and beautiful career in poetry, and bilingual children’s books as well.  He has a warm heart, a fierce strength and a sage demeanor — and a beautiful way with language in both Spanish and English. An open mic follows.

Bootstrap Press’s Derek Fenner presents poet Tongo Eisen-Martin with his new book, someone’s dead already. About the book: “Eisen-Martin’s syntax lands somewhere between Sphinx and Thelonious…through poem he makes spare, efficient, wild-eyed jazz…rubs mud and accountability into the pores of the zeros and ones in the glass and steel city. Throughout SOMEONE’S DEAD ALREADY, I return to the wonder of the writer’s economy of language, how deftly the words infuse their amulet casings with blood temperature at the edge of boiling. This work is as hungry as revolution, a necessary, deadly still in these shifting times…”—Marc Bamuthi Joseph About the author: Born in San Francisco, Tongo Eisen-Martin is a movement worker, educator, and poet who has organized against mass incarceration and extra-judicial killing of Black people throughout the United States. He has educated in detention centers from New York’s Rikers Island to California’s San Quentin State Prison. His work in…

In Avery Burns’ Murmurations Reading Series, the French poet Franck André Jamme, with translator Norma Cole, will read from his new book, To The Secret (La Presse, 2015).  In addition, poet John Sakkis celebrates his excellent new book, The Islands (Night Boat, 2014). Franck André Jamme has published fifteen books of poems and fragments since 1981, as well as numerous illustrated books (with Jaume Plensa, James Brown, Zao Wou Ki, Marc Couturier, Suzan Frecon, Yang Jie Chang, Olivier Debre, Acharya Vyakul, Philippe Favier). He has been praised by Edmond Jabes, Henri Michaux and René Char (whose Complete Works he has edited in La Pléiade), and has been translated by John Ashbery. He has published numerous works in the United States, including Moon Wood (Selavy Press, 2000); Extracts from the Life of a Beetle (Black Square, 2000); The Recitation of Forgetting (Black Square, 2003); Another Silent Attack Black Square/Brooklyn Rail, 2006); New Exercises (Wave Books,…