Diesel, A Bookstore in Oakland is pleased to present another installment of Poetry Flash, this time featuring Tom Healy, Martha Rhodes, and Alissa Valles, on Sunday, June 6 at 3pm. Tom Healy’s first book of poems is What the Right Hand Knows. Carol Muske-Dukes calls him a “poet who has a clear and urgent style, a straightforward ownership of his emphatically lyrical choices...These are poems about being off-beam, asymmetrical...the left and right hand at odds in their knowledge, the world tipped one way, then another.” Martha Rhodes has published three books of poems, Perfect Disappearance, At the Gates, and, most recently, Mother Quiet. James Longenbach says of the last, “Weird, dark, hilarious, direct, otherwordly—these poems display a poet in command of every note the English language is capable of sounding.” She is a founding editor and the director of Four Way Books, publisher of both Healy's and Valles’s collections. Alissa Valles’s Orphan Fire is her first book of poems. Publishers Weekly says, “Valles’s terse, learned, harsh collection is one of the standout first books of the year...her stark regard for the brutalities of European history [is] represented here by spare handfuls of images.” Born in Amsterdam to an American father and a Dutch mother, she grew up in both the United States and the Netherlands and has extensively studied Slavic languages, literature, and history. She is the editor and co-translator of Zbigniew Herbert’s The Collected Poems 1956-1998, a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year in 2007, and of Herbert’s Collected Prose, forthcoming this year.