Stephen Kessler

Stephen Kessler joins us on Thursday, August 9th to read from his collection, Garage Elegies.

About Garage Elegies

In Garage Elegies, Stephen Kessler records with grief and wit, documentary realism and ranging imagination, poignancy and irony, a journey through the gains and losses of a lifetime.  From the twenty-four numbered poems of the title (composed in the poet’s garage) to fanciful inventions like “My Gym at Midnight,” passionate meditations like “River Lovers” and nightmarish visions like “Bedless in Bedlam,” his emotional honesty, conversational lyricism and wry melancholy are at once dazzling and down to earth, heart-opening and consciousness-wrenching, retro-romantic and totally contemporary.  Open this book to any page and find an unmistakably authentic voice. 

Stephen Kessler’s poems, translations, essays, criticism, and journalism have appeared over the last fifty years in hundreds of literary magazines, newspapers, anthologies and books. His translations of Luis Cernuda have received the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Men’s Poetry, the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets, and the PEN Center USA Translation Award. His version of Save Twilight: Selected Poems by Julio Cortázar received a Northern California Book Award. He has edited numerous magazines and newspapers, most notably Alcatraz, an international journal; The Sun, a Santa Cruz newsweekly; and The Redwood Coast Review, four-time winner of the California Library Association’s PR Excellence Award. He is also the editor and principal translator of The Sonnets by Jorge Luis Borges, and the author of a novel, The Mental Traveler.