This event will be held at our 9th Ave. location.
Dana Levin and Dean Rader read from their latest poetry collections, Banana Palace and Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry.
About Dana Levin
Dana Levin's fourth book is Banana Palace (Copper Canyon Press, 2016). Previous collections include In the Surgical Theatre and Sky Burial, which The New Yorker called “utterly her own and utterly riveting.” Recent poetry and essays have appeared in Best American Poetry 2015, Poem-a-day, Boston Review, and Poetry. Levin is a grateful recipient of honors from the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN, the Witter Bynner Foundation and the Library of Congress, as well as the Rona Jaffe, Whiting and Guggenheim Foundations. She serves as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Maryville University in St. Louis.
About Dean Rader
Dean Rader published three books in 2017: Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry (Copper Canyon Press); Suture, a collection of collaborative sonnets written with Simone Muench (Black Lawrence) and the anthology Bullets Into Bells: Poets and Citizens Respond to Gun Violence, with Brian Clements & Alexandra Teague (Beacon Press). He writes regularly for The San Francisco Chronicle, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, and The Huffington Post and is a professor at The University of San Francisco. In their review of Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry, Publishers Weekly wrote: “few poets capture the contradictions of our national life with as much sensitivity or keenness.”
"Images that are satisfyingly clear . . . and excitingly inexplicable." --Robert Pinsky, Washington Post
"Intimate and hypnotic . . . whether turning her gaze inward or outward, these poems question the moral, aesthetic, and metaphysical needs that poetry exists to fill." --Ploughshares
From Ars Poetica
Six monarch butterfly cocoons
clinging to the back of your throat--
you could feel their gold wings trembling. . .
"Readers will find that this work carries the pulse of their darkest sorrows, in the breath of their humanity. Highly recommended."--Library Journal
"Intimate and hypnotic."--Ploughshares
"Levin has the skilled ear, magnificent tongue, and fierce mind of the truly prophetic."--Rain Taxi
"By writing honestly about the difficulties of self-representation, Rader represents himself as a writer who cares deeply about his audience and his craft." --ZYZZYVA
"Rader's poetry asks how to be an artist in a nation founded on and still struggling with the demand for representation and what poetry as a medium means in an era of representational sprawl." --Jacket
Poetry. "The endurance of the sonnet sequence over the centuries is in no small measure due to a paradox: it is a form that revels both in its fluidity and in its structural exactitude. The sonnet sequence is also apt to engage us because it is typically an expression of solitary yearning, just like the blues. Petrarch longs for his unattainable Laura; Son House laments his dead beloved.
A powerful call to end American gun violence from celebrated poets and those most impacted