POETRY FLASH PRESENTS…
Linda Watanabe McFerrin, author of POST-Apocalyptic Valentine will read with Jackie Berger author of Left at the Ruin
Thursday, November 14th – 7pm
Art House Gallery 2905 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94705
This new poetry collection by Linda Watanabe McFerrin, novelist, travel writer and winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction, navigates the spaces between depression, humor, and dark revelation. With inspirations as varied as Sylvia Plath and Lenny Bruce, “Post-Apocalyptic Valentine” spans time, space, and even our galaxy in exploration of what it means to love.
McFerrin is the author of two poetry collections and past editor of a popular Northern California guidebook. Her novel “Namako: Sea Cucumber” was named Best Book for the Teen-Age by the New York Public Library. In addition to authoring an award-winning short story collection, “The Hand of Buddha,” she has co-edited 12 anthologies, including the “Hot Flashes” sexy little stories and poems series. Her latest novel, “Dead Love,” was a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Novel.
“I have loved everything I’ve ever read by Linda Watanabe McFerrin. Her prose and poetry are filled with amazing women, charm, wisdom, and light. She is both soulful and precise, eloquent and full of life.” — Anne Lamott, author of “Bird by Bird” and “Hallelujah, Anyway”
Although the poems in this fifth book by Jacqueline Berger grapple with such subjects as sex, sorrow, and shame, there are also celebrations of delight and joy. Together they provide abundant insights about the past and present, as well as intriguing considerations of the future, “a ride that arrives // before we are ready to leave.” With powerful emotional concision, she explores, unabashedly, what it means to live. Left at the Ruin is an exceptional collection.
Jacqueline Berger is the author of five books of poetry. The Mythologies of Danger (1998), selected by Alberto Rios, won the Bluestem Award and the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association Award (BABRA). Her second book, Things That Burn (2004), selected by Poet Laureate Mark Strand, was the 2004 winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Prize and was published through the University of Utah Press. Her third book, The Gift That Arrives Broken (2010) won the Autumn House Poetry Prize, judged by Alicia Ostriker. The Day You Miss Your Exit (2018) was published by Broadstone Books. Her latest collection, Left at the Ruin, arrived in August from Terrapin Books.
Several of Jacqueline’s poems have been featured on Garrison Keillor’s Writers Almanac. Her poetry has also appeared in numerous anthologies and journals, among them: American Poetry: The Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon), On The Verge (Agni Press), Old Dominion Review, Rhino, River Styx, Nimrod, and The Iowa Review.
She is a professor emerita of English at Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, California, and lives on the Central Coast.