Poetry Night via ZOOM! Join us at 8 PM on Thursday, April 1st, 2021.
Dear Friends of Poetry,
Spring has sprung, and we lovers of poetry should feel obligated to do the same by attending an online poetry reading at 8 PM on Thursday, April 1st To participate, visit https://ucdavisdss.zoom.us/my/andyojones at 8 PM, or a few minutes before if you wish to chat with the host and the other attendees.
This short (30ish-minute) reading will feature poetry by Julia Levine and Joseph Millar. Please join us Thursday for the particular pleasures of poetry, or what Arnold Adoff calls “making music with words and space.”
Julia B. Levine is the author of four previous poetry collections, including Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight, winner of the Northern California Book Award for Poetry. She is also a recipient of the Discovery/The Nation Award and the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry from Nimrod. Her work has been widely published in journals such as Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, and the Southern Review. She lives and works in Davis, California.
Struggling to accept her impending blindness, the speaker in Julia B. Levine’s fifth collection of poetry, Ordinary Psalms,asks everyday life to help her learn how to see beyond appearances into fundamental truths. As she contemplates the loss of one friend to cancer and another to suicide, along with her own visual impairment, Levine holds the world “close as I needed / to see.” Imagistic, lyrical, and at times imploring divine intervention from a god she does not know or trust, these poems curse and praise the extraordinary place we live in and are in danger of losing. Lamenting that “this world is a mortal affliction / with wounds in the beautiful,” Ordinary Psalms provides a seductive and lyric rumination on radiance, loss, and grief. Published by LSU Press, Ordinary Psalms is now available for purchase.
Joseph Millar will be reading with Julia Levine. Millar’s Dark Harvest: New and Selected Poems is due out this fall from Carnegie Mellon. His work has appeared in many magazines and journals, including The Alaska Quarterly Review, DoubleTake, Ploughshares, Poetry International, and Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, TriQuarterly, New Letters, Raleigh Review and Shenandoah. His poems have won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the NEA, as well as the Pushcart Prize. Joseph Millar teaches in Pacific University’s Master of Fine Arts in Writing program and lives in Richmond, CA.
Historically, Julia Levine has filled the John Natsoulas Gallery with each of her book launches. Please join us on April 1st to find out why, and to help us fill a Zoom room.
The Poetry Night Reading Series, taking place on the first and third Thursdays of the month, is generously supported by the people and poets of the Sacramento Valley, and those from many other locations via the magic of Zoom. Your host is Dr. Andy Jones, the poet laureate emeritus of the City of Davis. See Dr. Andy’s (free) weekly newsletter at https://andyjones.substack.com – Please subscribe!
Please join us on Thursday, April 1st, at 8 PM via ZOOM!
Dr. Andy
Find the Facebook Event Page for this Reading Here: https://www.facebook.com/events/270246291253699/
P.S. Future Poetry Night readers will include Katie Peterson (in May), DR Wagner, Michael Rothenberg, and Hannah Stein (this fall). Please plan always to join us on first and third Thursdays of the month! We need you.
