Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Beverly Burch and Linda Marie Prather

Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center presents Second Tuesday Poetry, featuring Beverly Burch and Linda Marie Prather. Hosted by Modesto poet laureate emeritus Stella Beratlis. 

Date: Tuesday, Dec 13, 2022
Time: 7:00 pm PST
RSVP for Zoom link

Open mic follows featured readers. Please sign up and plan to read for about 3 minutes.

Beverly Burch

Beverly Burch’s new book, Leave Me a Little Want, was published by Terrapin Books this year. Her last book, Latter Days of Eve (BkMk Press), won the John Ciardi Prize. How a Mirage Works (Sixteen Rivers) was a finalist for the Audre Lorde Award. Her first book, Sweet to Burn (2004), won the Gival Poetry Prize and Lambda Literary Award. Beverly’s poems and prose can be found in 32 Poems, Gulf Coast, Southern Review, Denver Quarterly, Los Angeles Review, New England Review, Barrow Street, Smartish Pace, and Grist. She also has two psychoanalytic books on women’s sexual and gender relations: On Intimate Terms (University of Illinois) and Other Women (Columbia University). Beverly grew up in Atlanta, GA and has lived many years in Oakland, CA with her wife. 

About Leave Me a Little Want

“I love this book and its urgent attention to language and form in the “treacherous province” of our current times. Burch never turns away from the coexistence of the beautiful and the bloody, the tedious and the risky, and so I not only trust her, but feel jolted awake.”

-Julia Levine, Ordinary Psalms

Linda Maria Prather 

Linda Marie Prather has five published chapbooks, the latest Searching Shadows, Finding Shade, (Cactus Wren Press). Unforced Rhythms, (Finishing Line Press) won 3rd place in the NLAPW 2014 Letters Competition. Her full-length book, Summer Song, was published in 2016 by Pen Women Press. She edits for Song of The San Joaquin and is a member of National League of American Pen Women, in Arts and Letters.

Her poetry appears in More Than Soil, More Than Sky: The Modesto Poets. Linda’s published
widely and received prizes from Penumbra, Poets’ Dinner Contest, and the Ina Coolbrith Circle. She has won
the Golden Pegasus Award and has been featured poet twice for the Stanislaus Connections poetry column  “A Gathering of Voices.” She has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize.

Poetry on the Spot at ModShop

Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center will be back in action with Poetry on the Spot at Saturday’s Mod Shop Handmade Market. Poets from MoSt will write you a poem right there on the spot using words you choose. We’ll be at Mistlin Gallery  on J Street  between 10th and 11th streets from 2:00 to 8:00 on Saturday, November 26.

Nov 21

MoSt’s Poetry Everywhere Initiative: Getting Poetry Books to Schoolkids

Salida Elementary School receives donation of poetry books from Sal Salerno of Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center & Modesto's poet laureate
Staff member from Salida Elementary School with MoSt Poetry’s donation of poetry books delivered by Sal Salerno, Modesto’s poet laureate and Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center board member.

In the nearly ten-year history of the Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center it has taken on few projects more ambitious than to donate sets of brand new poetry books to every public school in the county. But that’s exactly what MoSt adopted as a goal about five years ago and has been working to achieve ever since.

“As a small nonprofit, our Poetry Everywhere Initiative is a multi-year project, but so far we have donated books to 47 elementary schools and the library at juvenile hall,” explained MoSt board President Gillian Wegener.

The books chosen for the program offer a rich and diverse sampling of poetry for
younger readers.

Staff from C. F. Brown Elementary School in Modesto receive donation of poetry books from Sal Salerno of Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center & Modesto's poet laureate
Staff from C. F. Brown Elementary School in Modesto receive donation of poetry books from Sal Salerno, Modesto’s poet laureate & board member for Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center


“There are no strings attached to this donation,” Ms. Wegener continued. “We believe in the power of poetry to change lives, and we want to share that in all ways possible. By donating books to every school – beginning with elementary schools, we hope that poetry will reach even our youngest community members and help them see the joy and wonder alive in that art form.”


Although the pandemic necessitated an interruption in the program for two years, MoSt redoubled its efforts this year, donating poetry books to 8 schools in the spring, and another 10 schools in November. Altogether, MoSt donated 330 books through the Poetry Everywhere Initiative in 2022 alone.

Kiss Me Like You Voted: Election Night Open Mic

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, wrote the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1821 in the essay, “A Defence of Poetry.” By this, he meant that poetry reflects the real world and that the poet’s imagination is the faculty  which allows us to perceive beauty in the world–thereby helping create civilization itself. Poets are makers of civilization, no less–hence, poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

With this in mind, we invite you to the Election Day installment of the Second Tuesday Poetry series. The November 8 reading is a virtual open mic around the questions: How do we reckon the promise of this country with its violent past and present? How can we love when so much is on the line? How can we NOT love?

Open mic 15 poets max; 3 minutes per person–sign up to read at https://forms.gle/izdLKgzryo1uFzwLA

RSVP for Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYscOqhpjgrGNZ9calCIAyo_9KPb7XWmAy_

 

MoSt Poetry Book Club

Monday, November 21, 2022     6:30-7:30 p.m.     

Stanislaus County Library Makerspace    1500 I Street, Modesto

 The Hurting Kind by Ada Limón

Join host Gary Thomas for a discussion of The Hurting Kind by Ada Limón, the author of six books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry.  Limón is also the host of the critically-acclaimed poetry podcast, The Slowdown.  Her new book of poetry, The Hurting Kind, is out now from Milkweed Editions.  She is the 24th Poet Laureate of The United States.

5 copies of the book are available (while they last) to check out at the Modesto Library (1500 I Street.).

 An astonishing collection about interconnectedness—between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves—from National Book Critics Circle Award winner, National Book Award finalist, and U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón. 

 “I have always been too sensitive, a weeper / from a long line of weepers,” writes Limón.  “I am the hurting kind.”  What does it mean to be the hurting kind?  To be sensitive not only to the world’s pain and joys, but to the meanings that bend in the scrim between the natural world and the human world?  To divine the relationships between us all? To perceive ourselves in other beings—and to know that those beings are resolutely their own, that they “do not / care to be seen as symbols”?

“Ada Limón’s sixth and latest collection is a testament to the power of sensitivity. As with her previous award-winning books, The Carrying and Bright Dead Things, these poems are acutely aware of the natural world. And Limón has a knack for acknowledging nature’s little mysteries in order to fully capture its history and abundance. For her, evidence of poetry is everywhere. She connects big ideas – fear, isolation, even death – with little details, like field sparrows, a box of matches or “the body moving / freely.” Above all, The Hurting Kind asks for our attention to stay tender.” NPR, Books We Love

“”Poetry readers have come to expect greatness from Limón, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and finalist for the National Book Award, and that is exactly what the author offers in The Hurting Kind. . . . My most brief statement on the quality of this collection is this: If you have space to teach just one book of poetry, make it The Hurting Kind. . . . What Limón manages with The Hurting Kind is rare; the poems are at once highly specific and yet broadly relatable, both technically masterful and easily comprehensible. In sum, this collection works equally well for both the avid poetry enthusiast and the reluctant reader. If I was going to try and convince someone that poetry is our most important verbal art, I would start with The Hurting Kind. . . . The Hurting Kind is a collection that begs to be shared, and one that will inevitably show signs of wear as readers carry it with them for weeks at a time.”—The Poetry Question