Diesel, A Bookstore in Oakland is please to present another installment of Poetry Flash, this time featuring Steve Kowit and Alicia Suskin Ostriker, on Sunday, May 23 at 3pm. Steve Kowit’s new book of poems, a collaboration with the artist Lenny Silverberg, is Crossing Borders. Robbie Conal, who wrote the introduction, calls the book “tough, poignant...drawings and poems addressing the international epidemic of refugees.” He characterizes Kowit as “the most raging, socially concerned, funniest dead serious poet I’ve ever met.” Among his books of poems are The First Noble Truth, The Gods of Rapture, and The Dumbbell Nebula. He’s won two Pushcart Prizes, an NEA fellowship, and a Tampa Review Prize for Poetry. His poems have been read by Garrison Keillor on NPR, and he’s the author, as well, of the teaching manual In the Palm of Your Hand: The Poet’s Portable Workshop. Alicia Suskin Ostriker’s new book of poems is The Book of Seventy. Joyce Carol Oates says of it, “Here is a hard, obdurate, elusive sort of beauty. Alicia Ostriker is not only one of our very best poets but one of our most crucial.” This is her twelfth book of poems; others include The Mother/Child Papers, No Heaven, The Volcano Sequence, and The Little Space: Poems Selected and New, 1968-1998. She has received the Paterson Poetry Prize, the William Carlos Williams Award, the San Francisco State Poetry Center Award, and she has twice been a finalist for the National Book Award.