A Place for Us, a Time and Place for Us

It's depressing when a bookstore closes, especially when it's become your home. As we've blogged, when Books Inc. Castro closed, the Books Inc. owners asked us to continue the Perfectly Queer book reading series at the Opera Plaza store. That store will be adding Queer books on display and hopes to host Queer book clubs and events. We agreed to move. Here's a photo of the entrance. The location is on Van Ness between Golden Gate and Turk in the Civic Center cultural district, just up from the Symphony and the War Memorial Opera House. There's a parking garage in the building, buses run along Van Ness and you're only a 15 minute walk from the MUNI stop at Van Ness or the BART stop at Civic Center. Come see us Monday, July 11--6:45 for wine, water and snacks, 7pm for readings by Michael Aleynikov, Jim Provenzano and Na'amen Gobert Tilahun. More info at https://www.facebook.com/events/619573908219248/

The Long & Short of It

Here's the poster for the July 2016 Perfectly Queer book reading at our new home, Books Inc. Opera Plaza. Come see us at 601 Van Ness in San Francisco on Monday, July 11--6:45pm for wine and desserts, 7pm for the readings. 3 authors who write short fiction AND long fiction will be reading. Panel discussion and book signing follow the readings. Here's the link for more information: Facebook.com/events/619573908219248/

2016 Pride Poetry Readings

2016 Pride Poetry panelists (from left) James J. Siegel, MK Chavez, Natasha Dennerstein, and Nico Peck read last night in San Francisco at Books Inc. Castro. Difficult to continue on after the massacre of Queer people in Orlando the day before, but all agreed that being together with other Queer people and listening to funny, serious, thoughtful, emotional Queer poetry was just what we needed.  Thank you poets, thank you everyone who came out to listen, and thank you to Books Inc.

Cinema, Kink and California

Natasha Dennerstein's new book of poetry Triptych Caliform is a three-part collection consisting of a Cinema section, a Kink section and a California section. The poems are in dialogue with each other across the sections. It will be published by Norfolk Press in September 2016. She will read poems from  Triptych Caliform Monday, June 13, 7 pm, at Books Inc. Castro, in the 2016 Pride Poetry Panel. This is an event in the continuing reading series Perfectly Queer. https://www.facebook.com/events/207796866274145/

Natasha was born in Melbourne, Australia to a family originating from Belarus. She worked as a psychiatric nurse for 20 years, which gave her an interesting perspective on the human condition. In 2016, she graduated with an MFA from San Francisco State University. She has had poetry published in numerous journals, including Shenandoah, Bloom, Red Light Lit, Spoon River Poetry Review, and Foglifter. Anatomize, her first collection, was inspired by the body. It was published last year, also by Norfolk Press.  

"In Anatomize, Natasha Dennerstein is the poet as a sensual anatomist, delineating the corporeal realm with a kind of spiritual fervor. What we are, we are, she splendidly affirms, from our heads down to our toes.  Reciting the saga of her own encounters with mortality, with beginnings and endings, with all that flesh entails, she declares with a Whitmanesque lyricism the song of herself--her individual take on our common humanity."  --David Eagleton, editor, Landfall Journal

(author photo by Jose Colon)

James J. Siegel @ Pride Poetry Panel

Poet James J. Siegel will read at Perfectly Queer June 13 as part of the 2016 Pride Poetry Panel, the last event at Books Inc. Castro before the bookstore closes its doors forever. James is the author of the new poetry collection How Ghosts Travel, published by Spuyten Duyvill Press.  He has also, for the past 10 years, been a literary arts organizer in San Francisco. He currently curates Literary Speakeasy, an evening of poetry and prose at Martuni's Piano Bar on Market Street.

"How Ghosts Travel is James Siegel's beautifully-atmospheric explication of his past, which here is ever-present.  His voice, though casual and colloquial at times, is always tuned to the lyrical as he resurrects his childhood and young adulthood in industrial and small-town Ohio in poems scarred with heartbreak and loss.  But what is perhaps most impressive about this debut collection is the sheer number of poems that remain vibrantly in mind long after they're read, among them "Fishing Photo, Circa 1984," "Boy Scout Blue," "Massillon," "Flatlands," "The Road," and "Serpent Mound," one of the most skillful love poems I've encountered. This is a book well worth the price of admission." (Myrna Stone, author of in the Present Tense and The Casanova Chronicles)

There is no price of admission at Perfectly Queer.  Enjoy free champagne and chocolate at 6:45pm and poetry readings at 7pm, followed by the four poets in a panel discussion on writing Queer poetry. Author book sales and signings finish the night. 

The Pyrrhiad author at Pride Poetry Panel

Nico Peck will read from their poetry collection The Pyrrhiad at the 2016 Pride Poetry Panel, Monday, June 13.  Xe is a writer, artist, and teacher.  Aggregate Space published their chapbook Save the Monsters last fall.  You can fine their work in the online journals Open House and Eleven Eleven.  The Pyrrhiad is available from Dirty Swan Projects. The author photo is by Kanishka Jayasuriya. 

Per Peck: Pyrrha was the name Robert Graves thought Achilles used for themselves so Pyrrha/Achilles was never one gendered, just as xe was both human and immortal (except for one vulnerability). The current understanding of Achilles as this uber-masculine warrior is totally a Roman colonialist overlay on the original epic poem. My imagined story is that there was also a Pyrrhiad cycle, that was one of anti-war sentiments, some of which still live in Homer's version. There is Pyrrha talking to herself, rather than to God, but the conversation of why fight or what it means to fight in a war is there--the death is there--the rebirth is there. Non-dual thinking is thinking that is divine, that is God consciousness, that is free from attachments to ego, to grasping. It is living that is only love-motivated. 

From a review of The Pyrrhiad:

"Poetry is just the right vessel to conceal a self that is multiple but not divided, an epic is at once local, and foreign, and without location at all. In Nico Peck's The Pyrrhiad, each poem is a map in hiding and a step aboard a thousand starr'd ships, each page a consent that collapses, breathless, into the arms of Pyrrha, who--mistaken for a cis-man--some have called Achilles. Peck neither reveals nor constructs but instead bridges a multitude of worlds by allowing the liminality of transformation and translation to sound off in voices both ancient and familiar."  --Meg Day

MK Chavez June 13 at Perfectly Queer

Poet MK Chavez has a chapbook mothermorphosis and a full length collection Dear Animal, both being released by Nomadic Press in 2016. Chavez is the cofounder/curator of the reading series Lyrics & Dirges and the codirector of the Berkeley Poetry Festival. Recent publications can be found in Aspasiology, Jam Tarts, and Rivet. 

Mothermorphosis is "an exploration of the sublime territory of mother. Poems situate the reader in the conflict between the idea and reality of what mother is in love, loss, sanity, and motherland." (from the publisher, Nomadic Press)

MK Chavez will read at the Perfectly Queer reading series' annual Pride Poetry Panel, Monday, June 13, 7pm at Books Inc. Castro in San Francisco. Champagne and chocolate at 6:45. More info at https://www.facebook.com/events/2077968666274145/

 

New Reader Added to June 13 Pride Poetry Panel

Poet Natasha Dennerstein reads from her new poetry collection, Triptych Caliform, due out this fall, at Perfectly Queer's June 13 "Pride Poetry Panel," at Books Inc. Castro. Natasha replaces Jezebel Delilah X, who had to withdraw because of ill health. www.facebook.com/perfectlyqueerreadings/