Christopher Bernard w/ Keith Ekiss, Clara Hsu, + David Wong

Booksmith hosts local poet Christopher Bernard for his new book Chien Lunatique. With Christopher will be poets Keith Ekiss and Clara Hsu, who will be joined by David Wong on the guqin. Join us for a night of poetry and music!

Love, Modernity, and the Internet. Just who, or what, is Le Chien Lunatique? The poet driven out of his mind when faced with the catastrophe of the modern world? The modern world turned into a rabid canine when faced with the hopelessly idealistic poet? Or when it looks in the mirror and sees what it has become?

These poems—profound yet accessible, contemporary yet classical, eloquent and dynamic even when apparently most despairing—distill one poet’s somewhat jaundiced look at modernity, from the Renaissance and the philosophical revolutions of the seventeenth century to the nihilism of post-modernism, from the death of God to the bankruptcy of humanism, from the midnight of the Enlightenment to the immortalized barbarism of the internet. Yet behind all of these poems, supporting them like a hand, lies the passion that drives all of existence, old or new: the ferocious and uncompromising demands of love.

A rabid dog eventually bites itself to death. So is there hope pour ce pauvre chien lunatique? Maybe there is. Maybe there isn’t. Only the future knows. It sits at your feet. Growling.

Christopher Bernard is author of the novels A Spy in the Ruins andVoyage to a Forgotten Planet, the short-story collections Dangerous Stories for Boys and In the American Night, and The Rose Shipwreck: Poems and Photographs. He is co-editor of Caveat Lector and a regular contributor to Synchronized Chaos. Bernard writes fiction, poetry, essays, plays, and criticism. His poetry can be found online at The Bog of St. Philinte. He lives in San Francisco.

Keith Ekiss is a Jones Lecturer in Creative Writing at Stanford University and a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry. He is the author of Pima Road Notebook(New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2010) and translator of The Fire’s Journey, an epic poem by the Costa Rican writer Eunice Odio in four volumes. Territory of Dawn: The Selected Poems of Eunice Odio was published in 2016 by The Bitter Oleander Press.

Clara Hsu practices the art of multidimensional being: mother, piano teacher, director of Clarion Music Performing Arts Center in San Francisco, traveler, translator, and poet. Henry W Leung wrote in Lantern Review on her work: “Hsu…remains faithful to the sense in Chinese while also refreshing our English idiom.” But Clara likes to experiment and transform her translations into unique poetic expressions, stunning in sound and form. She is currently finishing her translations of Lao-Tze’s Tao-te Ching, taking the ancient texts for a wild ride in the twenty-first century.

Hailing from a long line of Chinese scholars, David Wong has studied guqin (seven string zither), guzheng (Chinese table harp), pipa (Chinese lute), traditional Chinese painting, and tea culture under masters in the United States and China. As a member of the San Francisco Gu-zheng Music Society’s youth ensemble, with the support of guzheng virtuoso Liu Weishan, Wong’s passion for teaching and introducing traditional Chinese culture lead to the establishment of Tranquil Resonance Studio, which carries on the mission of passing along these ancient traditions to the greater community through lessons, performances, workshops and lectures throughout the bay area. In 2004 he received Honor awards and Outstanding Performance awards at the First International Guqin Competition held in Beijing.