Some of you may know of—and may even have attended—our Greetings Readings. These are events in which rogue poetry editor Don Bogen corrals group of our contributors in a rugged, faraway landscape (for example, Boston) for a night of incandescent verse, often followed by a hard-fought game of Twister. (Don is really, really limber.) One such eve took place over the summer at Mrs. Dalloway’s Books in Berkeley. If you missed it, worry not—we’ve got Greetings Readings in the works for Chicago, Kansas City, and an undisclosed location in the South. Read on for Don’s account of high times at Mrs. Dalloway’s.
Don Bogen: It was a great reading overall, with wonderful poems from previous issues, including work from Randall Mann’s Straight Razor, forthcoming from Persea this fall, Doug Powell’s Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award last year, and the prize-winning first books of Kathleen Winter and Mira Rosenthal; poems in translation from Italian—Patrizia Cavalli (9.1), whose sharp, short pieces Geoff Brock describes as “popcorn”—and Polish—Tomasz Rozycki (7.2), whose book Colonies, translated by Mira Rosenthal, is just out this year; and some new work we haven’t snatched up yet. A full house on a cool Thursday evening: lots of books sold and signed, copies of our last two issues going like hotcakes.
D. A. Powell and Don Bogen up front. Mira Rosenthal between them, with Kathleen Winter on the right. In the back, Randall Mann (left) and Geoffrey Brock (right).
