Thursday, April 1, 2010
Poetry reading by Jim Powell, Substrate (Pantheon Books, 2009) and August Kleinzahler, Sleeping It Off in Rapid City: Poems, New and Selected (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), both poets reading also from new and unpublished work, Mrs. Dalloway’s Literary & Garden Arts, 2904 College Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 p.m. (510-704-8222, www.mrsdalloways.com)
Jim Powell is the author of It Was Fever that Made the World and the translator of The Poetry of Sappho and Catullan Revenants. Powell was a awarded a CCLM Younger Poets Prize in 1986 and a MacArthur Fellowship (1993-1998), and was the Sherry Memorial Poet a the University of Chicago in 2005. His poems, translations and literary criticism have appeared in American and British journals, including Slate, The Threepenny Review, Paris Review, and Poetry. Powell is a fourth-generation native and lifelong resident of the San Francisco Bay region.
Substrate, Powell’s first collection in twenty years, gathers three new collections of his poetry. These poems open inward windows on the world outward from indigenous habitat in Northern California. They include the past as an aspect of the present, and spirit as a dimension of the actual.
August Kleinzahler is the author of ten books of poetry, including The Strange Hours Travelers Keep, which won the 2004 Griffin International Poetry Prize. He is editor of Selected Poems by Thom Gunn (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), and author of two prose books, Cutty One Rock: Low Characters and Strange Places, Gently Explained (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005) and Music: I-LXXIV (Pressed Wafer, 2009). Born and raised in New Jersey, Kleinzahler has lived in San Francisco for almost thirty years.
For his current collection of poetry, Sleeping It Off in Rapid City, Kleinzahler was awarded the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry.