Join us on Tuesday, February 7 at 7pm PT when Tina Cane celebrates her collection, Year of the Murder Hornet, with Tongo Eisen-Martin and Kim Shuck at 9th Ave!
Masks Encouraged for In-Person Attendance
Or watch online at the link below
https://youtube.com/live/tqlg-WWzdmU?feature=share
Praise for Year of the Murder Hornet
"In this fierce and enthralling book, Tina Cane records a time of pandemic and climate change, regimes and threats, murder hornets and dying seas, quarantine baking and leaf-blower protests, stimulus payments and food chains, gentrification and apps, conspiracies and personal theories, doom-scrolling and Great Conjunctions, fake narratives and disposable masks—and of sheltering in place when poetry is the only solace: the “iambic in the darkness.” Love is “a process of education” and memory “is a poet,” she tells us, making new paths for us to understand this painful time. With boldness and grace, Cane negotiates a tense present, a distressing future, and the wish for a “perfect past” tense. Her poems create a moving map so that we don’t struggle alone in our “personal weather” and remind us that we are also able to be “overpowered by flowering magnolias.”—Camille Guthrie, author of Diamonds
"We have, all of us, in recent years wandered into a spectacle, into some new, albeit strangely familiar, theater of cruelty. What rules of conduct can we possibly affirm? With genuine courage and in fierce measures, Tina Cane establishes a rule of heart and of vivid allegiances which I truly believe to be not only valid but redemptive. Year of the Murder Hornet, for all its ferocity, is a book of virtues and humane understanding. Here is poetry both urgent and durable."—Donald Revell
About Year of the Murder Hornet
Catalogue, essay, lament, Year of the Murder Hornet, Tina Cane’s new poetry collection, is a work born of tension. Juxtaposing the personal and the political, these poems navigate the uneasy terrain of the self amid an increasingly tumultuous and fragmented world. Taking up the poet’s mantle as seeker, Cane interrogates and wrestles with notions of personal narrative, theory, and truth, as well as our collective cultural realities. Year of the Murder Hornet is a book of this moment meant for all moments.
About Tina Cane
Tina Cane is the author of the poetry collections Year of the Murder Hornet (Veliz Books 2022), Body of Work (Veliz Books, 2019), and Once More with Feeling (Veliz Books, 2017). She has also published the chapbooks Dear Elena: Letters for Elena Ferrante (Skillman Avenue Press, 2016) and The Fifth Thought (Other Painters Press, 2008), as well as the young adult novel Alma Presses Play (Penguin/Random House) . Cane serves as the Poet Laureate of Rhode Island where she is the founder and director of Writers-in-the-Schools, RI. She is the creator/curator of the distance reading series, Poetry is Bread.
About Tongo Eisen-Martin
Tongo Eisen-Martin is the Poet Laureate of San Francisco, California. He is the author of Heaven Is All Goodbyes (City Lights Books, 2017), which was shortlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize, received the California Book Award for Poetry, an American Book Award, and a PEN Oakland Book Award. He is also the author of someone's dead already (Bootstrap Press, 2015). Blood on the Fog, his newest collection of poems, is volume 62 in the City Lights Pocket Poets Series.
About Kim Shuck
Kim Shuck embraces the fool and jester qualities of being a modern poet and artist. She is a devotee of San Francisco, whose hills she wanders nearly always on foot. Her maternal grandparents met at the Polish Hall on Shotwell and she spent many hours with her mother and grandmother wandering the Mission St. Miracle Mile, taking books out of the Mission Branch library and watching aquarium fish on the ground floor of what used to be Hale's. She firmly believes in carrying a bubble wand, keys, pen and notebook and cats cradle string at all times.
Shuck is widely published in journals, anthologies and a couple of solo books. She enjoys volunteering in SFUSD elementary school classrooms to share her loves of origami, poetry and basket making... in other words, math of various kinds. In 2019 Shuck was awarded an inaugural National Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, and a PEN Oakland Censorship Award.
(This book cannot be returned nor exchanged.)
Catalogue, essay, lament, YEAR OF THE MURDER HORNET, Tina Cane's new poetry collection, is a work born of tension. Juxtaposing the personal and the political, these poems navigate the uneasy terrain of the self amid an increasingly tumultuous and fragmented world.
2021 Golden Poppy Award Winner for Poetry - Chosen by the California Independent Booksellers Alliance
2022 California Book Award Finalist
Politically astute, filled with wisdom and great humanity, this is poetry meant to conjure a healing and provoke a confrontation, an invitation to a journey through Black America.
2019 NCIBA Golden Poppy Award Winner - Poetry
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San Francisco's 7th poet laureate--a Native American and native San Franciscan--explores urban space and the natural world.