2020 Legacy of Poetry Live Zoom Reading

Ellen Bass

Indigo

In this book, joy meets regret, devotion meets dependence, and most importantly, the poet so in love with life and living begins to look for the point where the price of aging overwhelms the rewards of staying alive. Bass is relentless in her advocacy for the little pleasures all around her. Her gaze is both expansive and hyperfocused, celebrating (and eulogizing) each gift as it is given and taken, while also taking stock of the larger arc. She draws the lines between generations, both remembering her parents' lives and deaths and watching her own children grow into the space that she will leave behind. Indigo shows us the beauty of this cycle, while also documenting the deeply human urge to resist change and hang on to the life we have, even as it attempts to slip away.

Legacy of Poetry interviews Ellen Bass about her exciting new book, Indigo, watch our interview.

Sally Ashton

The Behaviour of Clocks

Albert Einstein's thought experiments frame Sally Ashton's new collection of prose poems. Here she offers a poetic inquiry into time—the simultaneity of the past, present, and future in how each informs any moment. Fellow poet Amy Gerstler writes, "Ashton's investigative meditations maintain constant awareness of territories shared by physics and poetry. These wonderfully reflective poems arise from something like a physicist's precision of mind and a shaman's sensitivity of vision."

Michael Tod Edgerton

Vitreous Hide

Willing the word to become flesh, the poems in Vitreous Hide both reveal and enact yearning—for love, for the beloved, for the words to transform beloved image to beloved substance. Orpheus reaches for Narcissus through a new mirror of myth, now dim with distance, now bright with the possibility of connection. Through the shining skin or surface of prose lines and field composition, these poems reach for the embodiment of the other in order to be, themselves, embodied.

Gary Singh

An award-winning travel journalist with a music degree who publishes poetry, paints and exhibits photographs. As a scribe, he's published over 1000 works including travel essays, art and music criticism, profiles, business journalism, lifestyle articles, poetry and short fiction. For 14 straight years he's penned a weekly newspaper column for Metro, San Jose's alt-weekly newspaper, an offbeat glimpse into the frontiers of the human condition in Silicon Valley. He is the author of The San Jose Earthquakes: A Seismic Soccer Legacy, (The History Press, 2015) and was recently a Steinbeck Fellow in Creative Writing at SJSU, his alma mater.

Alan Soldofsky

In the Buddha Factory (New Odyssey Series)

Captivating and truthful, In the Buddha Factory is rich in detail, honest in tragedy, and poignant in observation. Through a mastery of style and language placed against the backdrop of Silicon Valley, Soldofsky explores the tension of opposites of place and no place, rich and poor, and finite and the limitless. These poems capture the intricacies of family, aging, and identity, and renders them in words both insightful and lyrical.