Los Angeles Literature Events 7/29/19 – 8/04/19

downloadYour Author Series: Rilla Alexander at Arroyo Seco Regional Library, LAPL – Kids Event

Please join us as Your Author Series welcomes children’s author and illustrator Rilla Alexander, as part of our Summer Author Program and Summer Reading challenge. The author will be reading her books, Swarm of Bees and A Bear Sat on My Porch. She is an internationally acclaimed designer and illustrator, and she has worked with such brands as Puma, Volkswagen, and Nokia.

Where: Arroyo Seco Regional Library, LAPL

Date: Monday the 29th

Time:  4 pm – 5 pm

Address: 6145 N. Figueroa St., Los Angeles, CA 90042

Website: http://www.lapl.org/whats-on/events/your-author-series-starring-rilla-alexander

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Facundo Bernal’s Poems Spotlight Early Chicano Life in L.A. Long Before Border Walls

By Alex Espinoza
FROM: L.A. Times

la-1553218495-skqvu0dmdl-snap-image.jpegAs the president issues the first veto of his tenure after Congress rejected his declaration of a national emergency to fund his wall, it’s hard to imagine that the dynamics along the U.S.-Mexico border were once different, when people shuttled back and forth between the two nations. Facundo Bernal marks such a moment in “Palos de Ciego,” his manuscript of poetry translated to English for the first time by Anthony Seidman as “A Stab in the Dark” for the Los Angeles Review of Books.

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Los Ángeles at Ground Level: Letters To My City by Mike Sonksen

By Brian Dunlap
FROM: Lit Pub

downloadThe poet Mike Sonksen knows more about Los Ángeles than almost anyone. It began when he was a kid, his father and both grandfathers introducing him to the sprawling city by taking him on destination drives. Due to his father’s love of architecture, having, “taught me about…Frank Lloyd Write from an early age,” Sonksen “had a natural interest in maps and geography.” Those drives fostered that interest, dipping in and out of distinctly planned and inhabited neighborhoods that made up the patchwork quilt of, not only the city, but Los Ángeles County.

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Los Angeles Literature Events 7/08/19 – 7/14/19

Author_Page_HeaderYour Author Series: Robin Benway at El Sereno Branch Library, LAPL – Teens Event

Please join us as Your Author Series welcomes YA author Robin Benway, as part of our Summer Author Program and Summer Reading challenge. The author will be speaking about her YA novel, Far from the Tree, which received the 2017 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. Her work has won many awards and her novels have been published in more than twenty countries.

Where: El Sereno Branch Library, LAPL

Date: Monday the 8th

Time:  3:30 pm – 4:30 pm

Address: 5226 S. Huntington Dr., Los Angeles, CA 90032

Website: http://www.lapl.org/whats-on/events/your-author-series-starring-robin-benway

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The Green of Sunset

By Dania Alkhouli
FROM: Moon Tide Press Blog

 

downloadBelieving in fate is a foundational part of my life, so when I was perusing my list of books to indulge in next, something called me to John Brantingham’s The Green of Sunset. For starters, I think it was the title. I hear sunsets get called everything but green, and this had me seeking out the elements of a sunset often unseen, like reading between the rays of a departing sun, and that’s something I needed this week.

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REVIEW: LITTLE MILLION DOORS: AN ELEGY BY CHAD SWEENEY

by James Benton
FROM: Los Angeles Review

MillionLike a hurricane of images, or a tsunami of grief, Sweeny’s lines strain against a background of stability and coherence that barely holds together. The book is an elegy not only because the title tells us so, but because it performs its elegiac ritual without the filter of conventional form or syntactical coherence. If grief is inchoate, the poet asks, what language is sufficient to the duty it is called upon to perform? The answer is a language suddenly released from its duties to inform or to persuade—functions of containment, framing, and interpretation—a non-syntax left to its singular capacity to conjure the ineffable, to bring it into being.

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Book Review: All That Wasted Fruit by Arminé Iknadossian

By Alexandra Umlas
FROM: Cultural Weekly

CvrWastedFruit_bookstore-196x300Arminé Iknadossian’s mother would gather olives from the trees that grew just outside of her daughter’s high school; she couldn’t imagine all of that wonderful fruit going to waste. Iknadossian has not written a poem for this image she remembers all of these years later, but perhaps all of the poems in her first collection of poetry are, in a way, an homage to her mother’s incessant olive gathering.

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A CLEANSING TORNADO: HEART LIKE A WINDOW, MOUTH LIKE A CLIFF BY SARA BORJAS

By Emily Perez
FROM: The Rumpus

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I had the privilege of spending a few days with Sara Borjas at the CantoMundo retreat in the summer of 2016. She is electric—smart, funny, sassy, vulnerable—and these qualities come through immediately in her debut collection, Heart Like a Window, Mouth Like a Cliff. The title indicates the heart will be fully exposed—a “window” that can be seen and seen through—but the mouth is another story. The image of the “cliff” suggests that the speaker’s words will present obstacles and launching points, precarious ledges and walls to slam against.

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