CROSS-STROKES
An anthology of poems by authors who have lived and worked in both San Francisco and Los Angeles. Edited by Neeli Cherkovski and William Mohr. Read sample here. Published by Otis Books | Seismicity Editions, Los Angeles, 2016, 238 pages, $12.95
Cross-Strokes spotlights these unfamiliar and mysterious poets, revealing strengths that rival their well-known counterparts … the anthology is an eclectic selection.
– Lana Turner Journal
HAIKU D’ETAT
Poems of social commentary. Cover image by Ryan Shaffer, book design by Mireille Schwartz. Read samples here and here. Published by Omerta Publications, San Francisco, 2013, 25 pages, $15.50
I’m digging the punchy, propulsive energy of your lines.
– Michael Slosek
I’d venture to say that no other poet is making what you’re making, no one I know of anyway: analytical busts w/ big slashes of paint still sticky on the sides. Your palette is curbside sunset, but the matter is all brittle high-heel clicks and open books in warm lamplight (from vanished Mission cafes).
– Julien Poirier
STANCES
Sonnets. Hand-sewn in letterpress wrappers, with a frontispiece by James Perry. Read samples here and here. Published by The Bird and Beckett Cultural Legacy Project, San Francisco, 2012, 45 pages, $7.50
I love their stance as anti-sonnets, sonnet-installations where the language is kaleidoscopic and refracted.
– Christopher Kondrich
It’s amazing, the breadth of your cultural intake. The poems are erudite, without being elitist. It’s such a natural exploration into the responsibility a poet undertakes in choosing our art.
– Jesse Morse
I like them quite a bit for their trim smarts and intimate ambiguities. They are different from and more intelligently engaging than most of what comes my way these days, and feel both up to date and classical, strange in ways that feel familiar and original, a tough tension to sustain.
– Stephen Kessler
I like your baroque touches!
– Suzanne Jill Levine
sonorous & richly informed & highly civilized
– David Meltzer
I feel as though I’ve stumbled into a landscape where language has decided, at last, to breathe on its own. Your lines seem to tug the reader awake, as if meaning isn’t something handed over but something discovered in the act of reading. There were moments when I felt disoriented, but it was the kind of disorientation that comes from turning a corner and finding an unexpected bloom growing out of the sidewalk: surprising, slightly strange, and quietly exhilarating. What lingers with me most is the tenderness that pulses beneath your experiments. Even when the words flow in a sort of stream of consciousness, something deeply human resurfaces—an immediacy, a kind of bare-handed intimacy.
– Miguel Gomes