Diesel, A Bookstore in Oakland is pleased to present another installment of Poetry Flash, this time with Cheryl Dumesnil and Jenny Browne. The Flash will be on Sunday, September 13th, at 3 p.m.

Jenny Browne's most recent book of poems, her third, is The Second Reason; Nick Flynn calls it "wild and beautiful and surprising. In this poet's hands the seeming mundane is transformed into the nearly sacred, the elemental reveals its inner mysteries, and scraps of overheard language dissolve into song." Her two previous books are At Once and Glass. She is also the editor of Provide and Protect, Writers on Planned and Unplanned Parenthood. She's a former Michener Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin.

Cheryl Dumesnil's first book of poems, In Praise of Falling, is the winner of the 2008 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press. Michael Waters says of it, "Cheryl Dumesnil passionately and at times irreverently approaches the consequences of desire. . .a debut of extraordinary transparency and generosity." She is the editor of Hitched! Wedding Stories from San Francisco City Hall and co-editor of Dorothy Parker's Elbow: Tattoos on Writers, Writers on Tattoos.

In Praise of Falling (Paperback)

By Cheryl Dumesnil

$14.95

ISBN-13: 9780822960416
Availability: Special Order - Subject to Availability
Published: University of Pittsburgh Press, 7/2009

The poems in this collection are the proverbial spring bulbs abandoned in the basement, growing toward a slim crack of sunlight. They are both aware of the limitations of social structures and forcefully committed to breaking out of those traps, urging toward a better way of living. The characters in these poems resist the twenty-first century's prescription for a life of emotional-spiritual bankruptcy, reaching toward an ever-elusive glimmer on the horizon.

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