Friday, May 12th at 7:30pm
at
Brickbat Books:
August Kleinzahler
reads from his two new collections
When
August Kleinzahler won the 2004 Griffin Poetry Prize, the judges’
citation referred to his work as “ferociously on the move, between
locations, between forms, between registers.” They might also have
said “between New Jersey and San Francisco,” the homes between
which Kleinzahler has spent his life traveling, both on the road and
on the page.
Before
Dawn on Bluff Road
collects the best of Kleinzahler’s New Jersey poems. Like the
landscapes they inhabit, they are by turns rocky and elegant,
abandoned and teeming, absurd and deeply poignant. Hollyhocks
in the Fog
collects the best of his San Francisco poems. They show the poet
in
an expansive, incandescent mode, the lover of French poetry and
Looney
Tunes, of
Chinese
food
and the lonesome hills.
Providing
readers with a gorgeous guide to Kleinzahler’s interior geography,
this doubled collection functions as both a map and an anatomy of the
lifelong passions and preoccupations of one
of
our greatest poets.
Sallies,
Romps, Portraits, and Send-Offs gathers
the best of sixteen years’ worth of Kleinzahler’s short
prose—essays, eulogies, and reviews—into one trenchant
collection, setting down his thoughts on poets both excellent and
otherwise, on kvetching fiction writers and homicidal fiddlers, on
unassuming geniuses and discerning nobodies, always with insight,
always with humor, and never suffering fools gladly.
Acknowledged
greats such as James Schuyler, Basil Bunting, and Lorine Niedecker
and neglected masters such as short-story writer Lucia Berlin and
critic Kenneth Cox get their due. Remembrances of Thom Gunn,
Christopher Middleton, and Leonard Michaels guide the reader through
the prickly process of remaining friends with world-class writers
without letting them take too much advantage of you. Finally, in
miniature memoirs that resemble poems in embryo, Kleinzahler turns
the spotlight on himself. Mixing serious analyses with off-kilter
personal insights, these twenty-four essays make for a delightful and
essential tour through a treasured poet’s life and library.
