Amber Flame w/ Arisa White

Booksmith is excited to host Amber Flame for the San Francisco launch of her debut poetry collection,Ordinary Cruelty! With Amber will be the poet Arisa White—please join us!

In Ordinary Cruelty, Flame spells out rituals in everyday decisions to hold on or let go. While questioning the role of elder, mentor, mother in the face of losing those figures, Flame details the unrelenting nature of parenthood through the cycles of grief. Her poems rejoice in the brown skin of the female body, while soberly acknowledging the societal dangers of claiming such skin as home. Flame takes the reader through a visceral examination of the body’s processes of both dying and continuing to live and the joy to be found while we do.

An award-winning writer, composer and performer, Amber Flame is also a professional singer, Hedgebrook alum, and member of The Watering Hole tribe. Flame’s original work has been published and recorded in diverse arenas, including Def Jam Poetry, Winter Tangerine, The Dialogist, Split This Rock, Black Heart Magazine, Sundress Publications, Redivider Journal and more. A Jack Straw Writer and recipient of the CityArtist grant from Seattle’s Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs, Flame’s first full-length collection, Ordinary Cruelty is just out with Write Bloody Press. Flame works with a Black independent media company, This Week in Blackness, co-produces the Oakland Slam, and teaches workshops for all ages. Amber Flame is a queer Black single mama just one magic trick away from growing her unicorn horn.

Arisa White is a Cave Canem fellow, a graduate from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and author of the books Disposition for Shininess,dear Gerald, and Black Pearl. Her most recent book is the full length poetry collection You’re The Most Beautiful Thing That Happened (Augury Books, 2016.)