Poetry Flash with Jane Mead and Judy Halebsky

Diesel, A Bookstore in Oakland hosts another installment of the always excellent Poetry Flash with Jane Mead and Judy Halebsky on Sunday, October 19th at 3pm.

Poetry Flash readings are wheelchair accessible; ASL interpreters may be requested one week in advance fromeditor@poetryflash.org. Visit Poetryflash.org for more events and reviews!

A striking combination of the spiritual and political, Money Money Money | Water Water Water explores the enormous impact that widespread environmental destruction makes on our way of life. With prophetic disquietude, Jane Mead’sinquiry into the interconnectedness of our choices exposes our existence as paradox. Her poems beseech us to consider the consequences of our collective actions on the planet.

Jane Mead is the author of three previous collections of poetry, most recently The Usable Field. She is the recipient of grants and awards from the Whiting, Guggenheim, and Lannan foundations. For many years a poet-in-residence at Wake Forest University, she now farms in northern California and teaches in the Drew University low-residency MFA program in poetry and poetry in translation.

Robert Frost believed a poem should begin in delight and end in wisdom, but in Tree Line, Judy Halebskyproves a poet never has to choose between the two. Her poems begin in both and end in both. Smart, sexy, thoughtful, and beautiful, Halebsky’s lyrics are a masterful marriage of tradition and innovation. This remarkable book loves many things, language and landscape to be sure, but most of all, it loves this world and how we make our way in it.

Judy Halebsky’s book SKY=EMPTY won the New Issues Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the California Book Award. The MacDowell Colony, the Millay Colony, and the Canada Council for the Arts have supported her work. Born and raised in Nova Scotia, Canada, she studied art and literature in Japan for five years on fellowships from the Japanese Ministry of Culture. With a collective of Tokyo poets, she edits and translates the bilingual poetry journal Eki Mae. She lives in San Francisco and teaches at Dominican University of California.