Renowned SF Poet Lew Ellingham Celebrates Birthday With Book Launch

Patrick Mellor’s new poetry book from Ithuriel’s Spear, Alkali Shores, is his first book of poems and was written over the last 15 years. Its aim is to represent the intersection of biological and cultural history expressed in individual human cognition and universal mythology.
Mellor has studied paleobiology, botany, and philosophy at Oxford and San Francisco State universities, specializing in the botany and ecology of the California deserts, philosophy of mind and early modern rationalism.

Kevin Killian will read from Fascination, a memoir of gay life in 1970s Long Island by one of the leading proponents of the New Narrative movement.

Fascination brings together an early memoir, Bedrooms Have Windows (1989) and a previously unpublished prose work, Bachelors Get Lonely. The two together depict the author’s early years struggling to become a writer in the sexed-up, boozy, drug-ridden world of Long Island’s North Shore in the 1970s. Fascination offers a moving and often funny view of the loneliness and desire that defined gay life of that era—a time in which Richard Nixon’s resignation intersected with David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs—from one of the leading voices in experimental gay writing of the past thirty years. “Move along the velvet rope,” Killian writes in Bedrooms Have Windows, “run your shaky fingers past the lacquered Keith Haring graffito: ‘You did not live in our time! Be Sorry!'”