Ferocious irritability.

Inclusionist Book & Poetry Project | Dec. 9th

Celtic Women Poets | December 4th

I'm a fool to do your dirty work.
I don't want to do your dirtywork no more.

frank andrick is a name dropping whore

POEMS-FOR-ALL | STEPHEN KESSLER | NOVEMBER 11

"A love poet of sensitive memory,
he constructs his poems as bastions
of feeling amid crumbling values
and collapsing affirmations."

-- Jack Hirschman Poet Laureate, San Francisco


The Poems-For-All Second Saturday Series presents poet Stephen Kessler on Saturday, November 11th at The Book Collector, 1008 24th Street, Sacramento. 8pm. Free.

STEPHEN KESSLER
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Poems-For-All Second Saturday Series
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Saturday, November 11th
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8PM
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The Book Collector
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1008 24th Street
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Between J & K Streets
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Info: richard@poems-for-all.com

Stephen Kessler is a poet, prose writer, translator and editor whose most recent books include WRITTEN IN WATER: THE PROSE POEMS OF LUIS CERNUDA (translation, City Lights), winner of 2004 Lambda Literary Award; TELL IT TO THE RABBIS and AFTER MODIGLIANI (poems, Creative Arts); SAVE TWILIGHT: SELECTED POEMS OF JULIO CORTÁZAR (translation, City Lights); APHORISMS by César Vallejo (translation, Green Integer); and major contributions to THE ESSENTIAL NERUDA (City Lights) and the SELECTED POEMS of Jorge Luis Borges (Penguin).

His essays, criticism and journalism have appeared widely in the independent and alternative press of Northern California, especially Poetry Flash, where he is a contributing editor. He is the editor of The Redwood Coast Review.

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Copies of After Modigliani and Tell it to the Rabbis are presently available for sale at The Book Collector and will also be available the night of the reading.
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Sleeping in Shelley?s Ashesby
Stephen Kessler(from After Modigliani)

I slept on the beach where Shelley drowned
and was burned right there by his friends
it was 1966 and we were driving up from Rome
and there were no vacancies in Viareggio
so Dave Mann drove his red VW bug onto the beach
and got stuck in the sand and we spread our pink plastic
laundry sacks from the laundromat in Venice
and lay there under the Mediterranean sky
gawking up at the summer stars and freezing
and being eaten by insects and I could feel
the zits on my unbathed back erupting with pus
on one of the most romantic nights of my life
which may explain why I became a poet
because I passed that first initiative ordeal
and went on to endure far greater discomforts
in the pursuit of rooms for rent and elusive muses
sleeping in Shelley?s ashes was essential
I relish the smell of his charred but fireproof heart
even tonight under a cool California sky
whose stars are veiled by coastal mist
and whose thin moon has set hours since
just past dusk in this other summer


Vallejo Remembers
by Stephen Kessler(from After Modigliani)

Do you still make that little buzzing sound
between your teeth as your lover is coming?
you were the only woman I ever knew
who did that
and it was immensely sexy
20 years ago?
or whenever it was we were given our time together
and here comes the sound of the cable-car cable
heard from your bed
as it hummed and clanked under Mason Street
and the tall glass of water you always placed on the nightstand
and your fluffy white terrycloth robe and the down comforter
and your mandolin or was it a balalaika?
and when I lay behind you cradling your little breasts
you?d grind your butt so deliciously into my belly
those nights on Russian Hill
just up from Keystone Korner and the police station
on a street named after a Peruvian poet
still reach me sometimes when I?m in the neighborhood
on the border between the smells of Chinese fish markets
and the erotic garlicky aromas of the Italian restaurants
red wine running through our brains and tongues
there was something radiant about those hours
so what if you made a habit of being late
it?s so much later now
what matters is what endures of our connection
brief as it was
a certain indelible residue
of tenderness