Kelly’s Cove has been putting out the most lovely run of books since publisher Bart Schneider got the itch to merge intriguing California writing and intriguing California art in beautifully crafted volumes… The books just feel good, as they arouse your curiosity and kindle the desire to crack them open and begin to absorb what they harbor between the covers. Then you find yourself lost in books that are deeper than you can really describe, that take their own time to go where they’re going, that are going somewhere you can’t be sure of but that make you sure you’re glad to be along for the journey. At the end, you’d have to read them again, go through them again, to know where you’ve been and where they’re taking you, what’s in them and what they’re made of, and even then you don’t know, but that makes you happy too. Congratulations, Bart.

The first round, a half dozen books, came out in the fall of 2011 — three were presented here at Bird & Beckett at the time: one, a “centennial selection” of Kenneth Patchen poems with his own inimitable art in both “picture poems” and individual paintings, the other two by Ambrose Bierce — a Devil’s Dictionary selection and a volume of Civil War stories, the latter accompanied by incredible paintings of landscapes, the tangle of nature and skies full of storm done by Chester Arnold, paintings independent of the stories they accompany but richly evocative, all the more.

Now, we’re pleased to be hosting a reading by the writers of another pair of Kelly’s Cove books, just published in the last few months as a bit more of the Cove’s landscape is revealed.

Paintings by Squeak Carnwath accompany short stories by Daniel Coshnear — two parallel tracks into their own distinct universes, unnervingly familiar but not quite fathomable; somehow, with this book, you get two places at once, at different times and simultaneously. It’s a little uncanny. The book is named for Coshnear’s work, Occupy & Other Love Stories.

Genine Lentine has written a sort of an essay, or a series of prose poems, in any case a piece of writing, in the book called Poses — executed, she explains, “over the past decade or so, within the context of figure drawing groups in which I’ve participated in New York City and Provincetown, Massachusetts. I’m especially grateful to Selina Trieff and Robert Henry, whose Friday morning drawing group was a haven for me when I first moved to New York in 2000. I first started coming to their group as a figure model, and sometimes came to draw. One morning, intrigued at the possibility of borrowing some of the conventions of the drawing studio – the timed poses, the focus on the model, the drawing materials themselves – I decided to experiment with writing from the model instead of drawing…” Poet Mark Doty comments, “I can’t imagine anyone more thoughtful about what happens there, more attentive to the rich and subtle exchange taking place between those who look and those who pose, those who lift pencil to paper and those who present themselves as “objects” to be seen in the light of the studio, to be framed upon the page. The word “object” never appears here, which points to the way this poetic sequence/meditative essay is in fact deeply concerned with who sees, and what is seen, and the troubled and infinitely promising possibilities of that exchange.” Details from a Richard Diebenkorn sketch are interspersed in Lentine’s work, expanding the experience of reading into the realm of contemplating the visual.

Please join us in celebrating the press and its books, and the writers and artists whose work they present.