An open house at the one and only non-profit book distributor is a wonderful thing. You can drift through the stacks shopping and enjoying discounts up to %40, there are readings, and snacks; you will be in with the in crowd. It costs nothing but a trip to Berkeley, California’s warehouse district. This year, it also happens to feature Pamela Lu’s very first Bay Area reading in, I think, as much as five years! Read about it here.

Bill Luoma, of Some Math fame, reads with Juliana Spahr in the mighty Spare Room Series in Portland, OR, December 11th. Details are here. The next night in San Francisco, enjoy yet another reading from Waveform at Canessa Park. Details below:

CANESSA PARK READING SERIES

 708 Montgomery Street (at Columbus)

San Francisco, CA 94111

December 12, 2011

Amber DiPietra

Denise Leto

Jai Arun Ravine

Doors open at 7pm. Reading at 7:30pm.

Admission $6. Refreshments.

No one turned away for lack of funds.

*****************

About the readers:

Amber DiPietra is a poet who lives and works as an advocate and peer counselor in the Bay Area disability community. She is also an energy worker and teacher of expressive somatics. Read more about Write To Connect (life writes for radical and everyday embodiments) and her palmetry practice at www.writetoconnect.blogspot.com. Poems and prose pieces by Amber have appeared in Make, A Chicago Literary Magazine, Mirage Period[ica], Tarpaulin Sky, Mrs. Maybe, Monday Night and TRY!. Her work is featured in anthologies such as Somatic Engagement and Beauty Is a Verb. Amber’s chapbookWaveform is a long poem, collaboratively written with Denise Leto. As an occasional performance artist, Amber has done shows with the Olimpias Collective, Axis Dance and recently, a solo piece at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco.

Denise Leto is a poet and Senior Editor at the University of California, Berkeley. A collaborative chapbook, Waveform, written with Amber DiPietra is out from Kenning Editions. Her work has appeared in Puerto del Sol, Beauty is a Verb, Cinco Puntos Press; Somatic Engagement, Chain Links Book Series; The Wolf Magazine, Arts Council of England; Aufgabe; Xantippe; and MELUS: Journal for the Society of Multi-Ethnic Literature in the US. She was an Artist in Residence at Djerassi Resident Artist Program and a Fellow for the University of Michigan’s Research and Practice Symposium on Movement, Somatics and Writing.

Jai Arun Ravine is the author of แล้ว and then entwine (Tinfish Press, 2011), Is This January (Corollary Press, 2010) and The Spiderboi Files. They received an MFA in Writing & Poetics from Naropa University. A recipient of fellowships from ComPeung, Djerassi and Kundiman, their short experimental film on Thai trans-masculinities, Tom/Trans/Thai, recently exhibited at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, Thailand. Find Jai online at http://jaiarunravine.wordpress.com/.

If a poet isn’t ranked in the top twenty-five, the feeling goes, why read him or her. Maybe I’m imagining it, this consensus-seeking chasing after the current number one with a bullet; maybe it’s real but also only a reflection of the larger culture. Most of the time I remember to forget it. When I do get that itch to compare compare compare, Bill Luoma’s second full-length collection Some Math reminds me not to care…

At Constant Critic.

Bill Luoma reads with Juliana Spahr at the Spare Room in Portland, OR, December 11th. Details are here.

Moles Not Molar presents

Friday, November 18

8pm

@ Vox Populi Gallery – 319 N 11th St., 3rd Floor

KATE ZAMBRENO‘s first published novel, O Fallen Angel, won Chiasmus Press’ “Undoing the Novel–First Book Contest” and was named as one of the best books of 2010 by Bookslut. Another novel, Green Girl, will be published this October by Emergency Press. Heroines, a critical memoir revolving around the women of modernism, some of which was incubated on her blog Frances Farmer is My Sister, will be published by Semiotext(e)’s Active Agents series in Fall 2012. She is a prose editor at Nightboat Books, and recently curated a series called Prose Event that interrogated the intersection of fiction and the essay for the Belladonna* Collaborative.

JESSE SELDESS recently relocated to Brooklyn from Karlsruhe, Germany. He is the author of two books, Who Opens (Kenning Editions, 2006) and Left Having (Kenning Editions, 2011), as well as chapbooks on Hand Held Editions, Instance Press, Answer Tag Press, and the Chicago Poetry Project Press. His work has recently appeared in the journals The Recluse, EOAGH, Jacket, Little Red Leaves (http://littleredleaves.com/LRL4/Jesse_Seldess.html) <http://littleredleaves.com/LRL4/Jesse_Seldess.html%29> , and out of nothing. Since 2001, he has edited and published Antennae (www.antennae-journal.com <http://www.antennae-journal.com>  <http://www.antennae-journal.com/> ), a journal of experimental writing and language-based performance and music scores.

IRIT REINHEIMER is an artist and media maker based in Philadelphia. In her creative endeavors, she works across disciplines to find the most appropriate media to express and communicate her ideas. This has lead Irit on a journey that began in fine arts with sculptural installations exploring the relationship between women and work, then continued to documentary and experimental film focusing on ideas of identity and loss. Most recently, she has delved into the world of production design for film, where her experience with both installation and video has been put to a new use. Irit is dedicated to her craft and continues to create her own work; her love for community and collective projects often steers her to collaborations. Irit’s films have been screened in the U.S. and abroad.  http://apartment2f.wordpress.com/

voxpopuligallery.org