Martha Collins + Rosa Lane

DIESEL, A Bookstore in Oakland hosts another installment of Poetry Flash on Sunday, October 9th at 3pm. The featured guest poets will be Martha Collins and Rosa Lane.

Poetry Flash readings are wheelchair accessible; ASL interpreters may be requested one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org. Visit Poetryflash.org for more events and reviews!

Martha Collins’s new book of poems is Admit One: An American Scrapbook. Booklist calls it “An unflinching look at the underpinnings of racism in the U.S.…Her poems are lists, definitions, newspaper pages, historic time lines, and biographical facts. These diverse poetic forms highlight the beauty of diversity itself. But Collins never lets up on the driving themes of unethical treatment and collective culpability.” Among her previous collections are Day Unto Day, White Papers, andBlue Front. The last two both won Ohioana awards, and Blue Front also won an Ansfield-Wolf Book Award and was chosen one of 25 Books to Remember by the New York Public Library. Among her other publications are three books of co-translation from the Vietnamese.

Rosa Lane’s first full-length book of poems is Tiller North. Jeffrey Levine says, “Rosa Lane’s poetry reminds us why, at a certain time in our lives, we’ve had enough of innocence. Here is a compendium of those so crucial, chronology-defying self-revelations that we only know through our skin. Every line carries with it a resonant sense of what matters and why.” Widely published in literary journals like Ploughsharesand Crab Orchard Review, she is the author of the chapbook Roots and Reckonings. She works as an architect, with a Ph.D. in sustainable architecture, and she divides her time between Maine and the San Francisco Bay Area.