Poetry Flash: Rachel Richardson + Martin Rock

Rachel Richardson’s new book of poems is Hundred-Year Wave. Victoria Chang says, “Hundred-Year Wave is a gorgeous book that borrows its vast subject matter from new parenthood, marriage, the ocean, whales, and Sylvia Plath….Her gifts are wide and deep like the ocean, as she shows us that ‘we are not lost/ in the vast expanse of lostness.’” A former Stegner fellow at Stanford and a recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, she coordinates poetry programming for the Bay Area Book Festival and co-directs Left Margin Lit, a new literary arts center in Berkeley.

Martin Rock’s collection Residuum was chosen for the Cleveland State Poetry Center’s 2015 First Book Award. Erin Belieu says, “Martin Rock’s remarkable debut collection, Residuum, takes on nothing less than making the unsayable (as Heidegger perceives it) ‘legible.’ I find the partial erasure form of this book dynamic, and lyrically fluid. Residuum is also genuinely moving and funny in spots.” A translator from the Japanese widely published in literary journals, he has held senior editorial positions at several journals and is Founding Editor of Loaded Bicycle, an online journal of poetry, art, and translation. Poet-in-Residence at Texas Children’s Hospital, he helps young patients express themselves through writing.