7-9pm, readings start promptly at 7:30pm
$8 entry (no one turned away for lack of funds), free for members
Reserve seats: member login or guest registration
Kit Robinson was born in Evanston, Illinois, grew up in Cincinnati, went to Yale, and has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area ever since. His new book Leaves of Class is just out from Chax Press. Other books include Marine Layer (BlazeVOX), Determination (Cuneiform), The Messianic Trees: Selected Poems, 1976-2003 (Adventures in Poetry), and two collaborations with Ted Greenwald, A Mammal of Style (Roof) and Takeaway (c_L Books).
Jean Day is a poet, union activist, and editor whose Daydream is just out from Litmus Press. Recent poems can also be seen in Chicago Review, The Delineator, Across the Margin, Open House, Breather, and Jongler (French)--as well as in her Triumph of Life, soon to appear from Insurance Editions. Earlier works include Early Bird (O’Clock, 2014) and Enthusiasm (Adventures in Poetry, 2006), among other books, and her work has also appeared in many anthologies, including, most recently, Out of Everywhere 2: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America & the UK (Reality Street, 2015). She lives in Berkeley, where she works as managing editor of Representations, an interdisciplinary humanities journal published by UC Press.
Tonya M. Foster is the author of the bilingual chapbook La Grammaire des Os and the poetry collection A Swarm of Bees in High Court. A co-editor of Third Mind: Creative Writing through Visual Art, Foster has published poetry and essays in a range of publications. She is a poetry editor at Fence Magazine, and is an Assistant Professor of Writing & Literature and Creative Writing at California College of the Arts.
Kit Robinson
Piling Up Into Cities
The tea is a signal
That you will soon be asleep
Dreaming of multiple forms
In the reproductive cycle of information
Piling up into cities
Certain themes recur
In the flicker box
Desire, combat, insolence
The right way to do something
Yellow red yellow red blue
Hang onto your hat
When coming down the mountain
It is not necessary to salute
Simply lean into the wind
Put the finish on your xyz
Jean Day
from Fallopian and What For
Like wishbones in the heraldry of dull afternoons
white bison glass over
the Last of Helena’s Chances
Do you still want to go there
with your needle-nosed pliers trained in the shape of a hook?
Say yes.
Melania, blink if you need help.
The meal refuses to cook itself
The beaver tail will never be done
to our satisfaction
When the polar ice melts
the bears come into town
so hungry
Tonya M. Foster
from In Tongues
3.
It ain’t even morning or early,
though the sun-up says “day,” and you been
staggering lange Zeit gegen a certain
breathless stillness that we can’t but call death.
Though stillness suggests a possibility
of less than dead, of move, of still be.
4.
How that one calling your tryin’
music, calling you sayin’ entertaining, thinks
there’s no then that we, (who den dat we?), remember/
trace in our permutations of say?
What mastadonic presumptions precede and
follow each word, each be, each bitter being?
False starts is curated by Steven Seidenberg
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