Oakland - Poetry Flash with Richard Newman and Lee Rossi
Diesel, A Bookstore in Oakland hosts another installment of the always excellent Poetry Flash, featuring guest poets, Richard Newman and Lee Rossi on Sunday, May 24th at 3pm.
Poetry Flash readings are wheelchair accessible; ASL interpreters may be requested one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org. Visit Poetryflash.org for more events and reviews!
Richard Newman’s new book of poems is All the Wasted Beauty of the World. George Bilgere says of it, “Newman’s poems, with their formal, lapidary precision, their indelible portraits of life in the cheap bars, back alleys, and rough-hewn edges of the Midwest, surprise a hunger in us for a language larger, wilder, and unabashedly loftier than daily speech.” His two previous collections are Domestic Fugues and Borrowed Towns. His poetry has been widely recognized, on Garrison Keillor’s radio program, Writer’s Almanac, in Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. He lives in St. Louis where he reviews books for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, edits River Styx, and plays in a junk-folk band, The Charflies.
Lee Rossi’s most recent book of poems is Wheelchair Samurai. Ruth Schwartz says, “These poems are scintillant with wit, shot through with sudden revelations and the startling, brief gleam of compassion and truth. Like the crowd gathered around a suicide in ‘Almost Icarus,’ Rossi keeps us, his readers, ‘straining for a glimpse of that body/ its imperfect beauty as fragile as our own.” Among his previous collections is Ghost Diary. A staff reviewer and interviewer for the online magazine Pedestal, his poetry, reviews, and interviews have appeared widely, in Poetry Flash, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry East, Chelsea, and elsewhere.