Monday, October 1st – 7 to 9 p.m.
Featured poets followed by an open mic
1st and 3rd Monday of each month
hosted by Jerry Ferraz.

Rebecca Farivar hosts a poetry podcast where, as resident poet, she talks with guests about poetry– the hook? the guests aren’t poets.  Rebecca, though, is assuredly such an animal… her most recent published efforts include the collection called Correct Animal (Octopus Books, 2011) and the chapbook American Lit (Dancing Girl Press, 2011).  She earned her MFA under Brenda Hillman at St. Mary’s College, learned a thing or two more there from Graham Foust and visiting poet Michael Palmer, is an East Bay native, has lived in Lyon, France and Bonn, Germany…

She’s drawn the phrase “correct animal,” intrigued by both its sound and its implications, from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up — and though the short poems in her collection may at first appear domesticated and approachable in their brevity, there’s a slipperiness of intent and implication that belies that perception.  “These small words pack a heavy punch and have a broad wingspan, they take off and pay you no mind.” — from a review on the “Vouched Books” site — read more here.

As for Ben Mirov, he’s got a book hot off the press from Octopus Books entitled Hider Roser.  You can view a snazzy trailer for the book on the publisher’s blog by clicking here — though much more revealing, if you’ll scroll down on that blog, is the Aug. 8 post, where you can hear Ben explain himself a bit…

From a review of his previous collection on the “Bookslut” blog: “`I should tell you something about my life,’ Ben Mirov intones in the midst of Ghost Machine [a Caketrain Press chapbook, 2010], and by this point, about two-thirds of the way through the book, the reader has already been absolutely inundated with bizarre images from the life of a poet that seems indissoluble from the words on the page — it feels at once autobiographical, despite any argument over the separation of ‘voice’ from ‘poet’ and so on, but also vaguely fictive, fantastical. Either way, this book is frighteningly honest in tone, fact, and style, and we are thrown into a vision of life that is at once playful and unbearable.” — read the complete review here.