A New Cadence Poetry Series

Presents

Roy Mash

and

Gerald Fleming

Reading from their works

@

The Felix Kulpa Gallery

107 Elm Street

Santa Cruz, CA 95060

May 26^th, 2015

Reception at 6:30pm

Reading begins at 7:30pm

Hosted By Robert Sward

Free

Roy Mash is a long time board member of Marin Poetry Center. He holds degrees in English, Philosophy, and Computer Science, though he currently doodles his time away staring out of café windows, dabbing up the seeds that have fallen from an everything bagel, and mentally thumbing over his poems that have appeared widely in journals such as AGNI, Barrow Street, Nimrod, Poetry East, and River Styx. He is the recipient of the Atlanta Review International Publication Award, and the Grand Prize Winner of the 2015 Poets’ Dinner competition. His first full length book, Buyer’s Remorse (Cherry Grove Collections), debuted in 2014.

"Buyer’s Remorse is a celebration of the small, the overlooked, the underrated. Doggedly anti-lofty, reveling in the This-Worldly, the poems caper around the themes of the body, of mathematics and rationality, adolescence and middle-age, love and fear and death. The tone ranges from the irreverent to the wistful – the spritz of seltzer in the face of the Creature from the Black Lagoon to the lover standing in one sock. Drawing on sources from The Three Stooges to Archimedes, Lavoisier to Tweety Bird, Mash is a latter day Anti-Oracle, a nail in the tire of post-modernity, an incorrigible wag who’s smuggled his pea shooter into the Church of Poetry. Be ready to duck."

Gerald Fleming’s most recent books are The Choreographer, longer prose poems (Sixteen Rivers Press, San Francisco) and Night of Pure Breathing, prose poems from Hanging Loose Press in New York. He’s written three books for teachers, including Rain, Steam, and Speed (Jossey-Bass/Wiley). His poetry has appeared in many magazines over the decades, including New Letters, Western Humanities Review, Carolina Quarterly, New World Writing, Hanging Loose, and many others. Between 1995 and 2000 he edited and published the literary magazine Barnabe Mountain Review, and currently edits the limited-edition vitreous magazine One (More) Glass. He taught in the San Francisco Public Schools for thirty-seven years, and lives most of the year in Northern California, part of the year in Paris.

 

Of Fleming’s Night of Pure Breathing, Gary Young said:

“These dark fables, written in a language ‘born of rage,’ furiously peel back the veneer of the world we think we know. Part fairy tale, part dream, these poems explore a region where the ordinary and the fantastic overlap, where a smile can get a job, and where identities are fluid and interchangeable... Many poems are set in exotic locations—Corfu, Bali, Mexico, Ukraine—but they all merge to create a discrete, elemental landscape, a poetic geography where this remarkable collection plays out. In one poem, ‘a boy and a girl court each other by telling ghost stories.’ Gerald Fleming’s Night of Pure Breathing is a collection that seduces the reader in just that way. Hold onto your socks; you’re in for a ride.” 

Co-sponsored with Poetry Santa Cruz