The Sky Isn’t Blue
Review by John Venegas
From: Angel City Review
Bear with me for a moment.
Have you ever been in group therapy? Group therapy has a stigma, partially deserved and largely undeserved, for being this boring, sad assemblage of people half-whispering self-help mantras or trying to find their collective “happy places”. But do you know what the real purpose of group therapy is? Empathy. In moments of depression and confusion, it is almost impossible not to feel an intense abandonment and persecution, as if the insanity of the world has turned its whimsical focus on you and you alone. Group therapy is meant to reveal to the individual seeking help that they are much more than just an individual; to lift the veil blocking out light and sound and connection with other people, many of whom are experiencing eerily similar pain and perceived isolation.
Los Angeles Literature Events 3/14/16 – 3/20/16
Mike Sonksen and Joe Gardner at Fox Coffee House
The 2nd Mondays Poetry Party features two street smart poets, Mike Sonksen and Joe Gardner, who will tell you stories of identity and growing up in Southern California. Join us at Fox Coffee House at 7:00 pm, with open reading sign-ups starting at 6:45 pm. Hosted by G. Murray Thomas and Sarah Thursday.
Mike Sonksen is a 3rd-generation Los Angeles native who has published over 500 essays and poems with publications and websites such as KCET, Poets & Writers Magazine, Wax Poetics, Southern California Quarterly, LA Weekly, OC Weekly, Los Angeles Review of Books and many others. His column “L.A. Letters” has appeared on KCET’s website for four years, and celebrates bright moments from L.A. literary history. He has been published in two anthologies, and his next book, Poetics of Location, is forthcoming from Writ Large Press.
Joe Gardner s a 2nd generation American drifter and writer, whose full-length collection, In the Shadow of the Bomb, was released in 2015. He is the Founder and hired gun for Working Class Production, as well as creator and co-producer of The Last Sunday, An Evening of Poetry and Art. His work has appeared in The Modern Drunkard Magazine, The San Gabriel Valley Poetry Quarterly, Cadence Collective, Spilt ink Poetry, as well as in several anthologies.
Where: Fox Coffee House
Date: Monday, the 14th
Time: 7 pm – 9:30 pm
Address: 437 W. Willow St., Long Beach, CA 90806
Website: http://www.localendar.com/public/CadenceCollective
Continue reading “Los Angeles Literature Events 3/14/16 – 3/20/16”
New L.A. Lit Podcast
Writ Large Press x Gerren Kelsaw present The Word at Large literary podcast.
Bringing you readings & interviews & all things Lit L.A 2 times a month. Subscribe on Itunes @ https://itun.es/us/To47ab.c
Pop up! Bookfest
Jess Castillo is the host of this bookfest in Glendale tomorrow. On Facebook she said about the event: “tomorrow night i will be hosting POPUP! Bookfest Fundraiser + Art & Music, an in-store & online fundraiser for Glendale’s first annual multilingual literary event series launched by Glendale Arts (my job) in partnership with Writ Large Press! there will be music by dublab, free art workshops, … Continue reading Pop up! Bookfest
Book club helps immigrant mothers find joy in reading and support their kids’ education
by Daniela Gerson
From: The L.A. Times
Mria Onate had not read a book until her son started high school.
Her illiterate parents ended her schooling when she was 15, informing her that she had to get ready for marriage and work to help support the family in their rancho in Puebla, Mexico.
More than two decades later, she was shocked when the parent center coordinators at her son’s new high school, Bravo Medical Magnet, suggested she join a book club. She was there for her child’s education. She thought it was too late for her own.
“I hated to read,” Onate, 44, said in Spanish. “I read in elementary school, but I never read on my own.”
Los Angeles Literature Events 3/7/16 – 3/13/16
Pen Emerging Voices Author Evenings: Henri Cole and Amy Gerstler at Chevalier’s
This event is part of the Emerging Voices Author Evening Series to benefit PEN Center’s Freedom to Write Programs. Free to PEN Center USA members. Tickets available to the public.
Henri Cole is the author of nine collections of poetry, including Middle Earth, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. He has received many awards for his work, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and most recently a fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard. His ninth collection, Nothing to Declare, was published last spring. He teaches at Claremont McKenna College.
Amy Gerstler is a writer of poetry, nonfiction and journalism. Scattered at Sea, a book of her poems was published in June 2015, and longlisted for the National Book Award. She was 2010 guest editor of the yearly anthology Best American Poetry. Her work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, and she has taught writing and/or visual art at numerous institutions. She currently teaches in the MFA Writing Program at University of California at Irvine.
Where: Chevalier’s Books
Date: Monday the 7th
Time: 7 pm
Address: 126 N. Larchmont Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90004
Website: http://chevaliersbooks.com/ or http://penusa.org/author-evenings
Continue reading “Los Angeles Literature Events 3/7/16 – 3/13/16”
NEW EVENT: Southern California Poetry Festival
A new poetry festival debuts in Southern California. Continue reading NEW EVENT: Southern California Poetry Festival
Douglas Brown: The Bridge between the Avant-Garde and Formalism
by Mike Sonksen
From: entropymag.org
Douglas Brown is a poet at the intersection of the avant-garde and tradition. Mixing experimental work with formalism, his work tackles three generations of his family history from his mother and father, his own rite of passage, and episodes with his son and daughter.
His award-winning book, Zero to Three is a tome of 32 poems about fatherhood, love, loss, American pop culture and the roller coaster range of emotions that are all a part of what it means to exist in the 21st Century. Published by the University of Georgia Press, this volume was the winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize in 2013. The poems utilize formal structures like ghazals, sonnets, catalogues and segmented cantos with more experimental styles like stream of consciousness and prose poems.
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L.A.’S UNKNOWN ORIGIN STORY IS VIOLENT AS HELL
BY TONY MOSTROMFrom: laweekly.com
Los Angeles suffers from (or enjoys) a kind of historical amnesia. In the popular mind, there’s an almost complete lack of an “origin story” for the city. That isn’t unusual as cities go, of course, but hey, Los Angeles is famous, L.A. has personality, and that implies, you would think, a generally known and worthy life story that everyone is hip to. The vague (and lazy) assumption that the birth of the movie industry and the birth of L.A. were one and the same obviously doesn’t cut any ice; we’ve all seen the year 1781 right there on the city’s official seal. The cliché that L.A. doesn’t care about its history seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy long fulfilled.
John Mack Faragher’s new book, Eternity Street: Violence and Justice in Frontier Los Angeles ($35, W.W. Norton), clears some of the fog to reveal what laid slumbering for centuries in the archives: a record of pure, unrelenting bloody horror. L.A.’s history after statehood was one nasty business. “In the 1850s,” the book jacket warns us, “the City of Angels was infamous as one of the most murderous societies in America.” L.A. was nationally notorious, “a terrible place for murders,” as one prominent San Franciscan warned his fellow citizens. Taking its title from Calle de Eternidad, one of the original streets of the old pueblo, this book is a lean-and-mean slab of history at its most brutal. As a pure chronicle of criminality, Eternity Street pretty much qualifies as a true-crime book. More importantly, it is probably the most violent “origin story” of an American city that you will ever read.
Continue reading “L.A.’S UNKNOWN ORIGIN STORY IS VIOLENT AS HELL”
Submissions Call for Angel City Review
Issue 2 was amazing and they can’t wait to make issue 3 (To be released at the end of June) even better! Submissions are now open from until March 31st 2016.
