APRIL 1-30 – National Poetry Month
FOURTH Annual Pocket Poem Giveaway
Mrs. Dalloway’s Literary & Garden Arts
2904 College Avenue
Berkeley, CA 94705
510-704-8222
Hours: Mon-Wed 10-7, Thurs-Sat 10-9, Sun 12-6
Come by and pick up a poem!
All during National Poetry Month of April, Mrs. Dalloway’s will offer our customers printed giveaway “pocket poems” selected by Bay Area poets, featuring poems by Kim Addonizio, Jannie Dresser, Keith Ekiss, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Forrest Hamer, Jane Hirshfield, Rachel Loden, Randall Mann, Michael McClure, Derek Mong, Craig Santos Perez, Melissa Stein, Alexandra Teague, and Kristen Tracy.
THEN:
Carry your pocket poem to unfold and share with family, friends, and co-workers on Thursday, April 14, the Fourth National Poem in Your Pocket Day!
FRIDAY, APRIL 1, 7:30 p.m.
DOUBLE BOOK LAUNCH CELEBRATION and POETRY READING by
CHRISTINA HUTCHINS and JEANNE WAGNER
Mrs. Dalloway’s Literary & Garden Arts
2904 College Avenue
Berkeley, CA 94705
510-704-8222
Wine and hors d’oeuvres will be served.
KICK OFF NATIONAL POETRY MONTH!
Please join us for a double book launch celebration and first poetry reading by local award-winning poets Christina Hutchins, The Stranger Dissolves (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2011), and Jeanne Wagner, In the Body of Our Lives (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2011).
Moving seamlessly between the speaker’s interior reflections and the physical world, The Stranger Dissolves, Christina Hutchins’ debut collection, traces the love between two women and the simultaneous ebbing of a beloved father into Alzheimer’s. The poems often place us in a specific location—Vermont in summer, a hailstorm in Squaw Valley, on the San Francisco Bay Bridge—while eddying us on invisible currents of politics and personal desire. Hutchins crafts poems with both clarity and metaphysical reach, illuminating our most intimate relations even as we are expanded by their loss.
“The Stranger Dissolves is an exquisite debut volume. This superb collection is elegant, impassioned, and consistently wise in its reckonings.” —David St. John
Christina Hutchins’ second chapbook, Radiantly We Inhabit the Air, won a Robin Becker Prize. Her literary awards include the Missouri Review Editors’ Prize, the National Poetry Review Finch Prize, a James D. Phelan Literary Award, and two Barbara Deming Poetry Awards. Her poems have appeared in many magazines and anthologies. She lives in Albany, where she serves as the city’s first poet laureate.
In the Body of our Lives, Jeanne Wagner’s second full-length collection of poems, looks back on a Cold War-era childhood and its effect on the construction of a self. Refusing both sentimentality and censure, the poet shines an unflinching light on a home characterized by alienation, stringent Catholicism, shadowy alcoholism, and the inescapable attitudes and historic events of the 1950s. With intelligence and vivid language, Wagner writes of the body as a perpetual stranger, yet, illuminated by subtly shifting qualities of light, the body remains a home, the housing of life itself.
“Jeanne Wagner’s poetry rides through a landscape both familiar in its humanity and astonishingly new.” —Jeanne Emmons
Jeanne Wagner is the recipient of several national awards, including the 2009 Briar Cliff Review Award and most recently, the 2010 Inkwell Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared in Nimrod, Mississippi Review, The Cincinnati Review, and Southern Poetry Review, among others. She has published three chapbooks and one previous full-length collection, The Zen Piano Mover, winner of the 2004 Stevens Manuscript Prize. She lives in Kensington.
THURSDAY, APRIL 7, 7:30 p.m.
POETRY READING at Mrs. Dalloway’s Literary & Garden Arts
KIM ADDONIZIO and KEETJE KUIPERS
Mrs. Dalloway’s Literary & Garden Arts
2904 College Avenue
Berkeley, CA 94705
510-704-8222
Please join us for a poetry reading by Kim Addonizio, Lucifer at the Starlite (W.W. Norton, 2011), and Keetje Kuipers, Beautiful in the Mouth BOA Editions, Ltd, 2010).
Kim Addonizio’s fifth collection Lucifer at the Starlite explores life’s dual nature: good and evil, light and dark, suffering and moments of unexpected joy. Whether looking outward to events on the world stage—the war in Iraq, the 2004 Asian tsunami—or inward at struggles with the self, these poems aim at the heart and against the feeling that Lucifer may have already won the day.
“Addonizio doesn’t do pretty; beneath her considerable wit is a wickedly sharp edge.”—Library Journal, starred review.
“Bitter, urgent and unsparing, her poems are also at times jaw-droppingly brilliant.” —San Diego Union-Tribune
Kim Addonizio is a fiction writer, poet, and teacher. She is the author of five books of poetry. Other work includes Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within. A finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry (for Tell Me), Addonizo has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA Fellowships, and a Pushcart Prize. Her poems have appeared in leading literary journals and anthologies, including Best New Poets 2009, New England Review, and the American Poetry Review. She lives in Oakland, California.
Keetje Kuipers’ debut collection Beautiful in the Mouth was selected by Thomas Lux as winner of BOA’s A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. In his foreward Lux writes “I was immediately struck by the boldness of imagination, the strange cadences, and wild music of these poems. We should be glad that young poets like Keetje Kuipers are making their voices heard not by tearing up the old language but by making the old language new.”
Keetje Kuipers is the recipient of fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and Squaw Valley Community, as well as awards from the Atlanta Review and Nimrod. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, West Branch, Painted Bride Quarterly, and AGNI, among others, and have been nominated five years in a row for the Pushcart Prize. Kuipers is now a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and lives in San Francisco.