Three Local Poets Read Recent Work + Ovid’s Metamorphoses

Susan Gevirtz’s Burns (Pamenar Press, 2022) is a tour of documents of the unperceived, an archive of investigations of investigation staged in lyric prose, poetry and a play. Susan Gevirtz’s books of poetry include Hotel abc (2016), Aerodrome Orion & Starry Messenger (2010), Thrall (2007), Hourglass Transcripts (2001), Black Box Cutaway (1999), PROSTHESIS :: CAESAREA (1994, reissued by Little Red Leaves, 2009), Taken Place (1993) and Linen Minus (1992). Susan’s critical books are Coming Events (Collected Writings) (2013) and Narrative’s Journey: The Fiction and Film Writing of Dorothy Richardson (1996).

Evan Kennedy’s new book is Metamorphoses: City Lights Spotlight No. 22 which prings from Ovid’s epic poem to explore the slipperiness of identity. In poems that shift registers from travelogue to elegy, from nature documentary to a simple record of the realities of daily life, Kennedy focuses on transformation, personal and collective, in an empire in decline, in a world transfigured by ecological upheaval. Like a fever dream over Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, Kennedy has one foot in Ancient Rome and the other in contemporary San Francisco.

Syd Staiti is the author of Seldom Approaches (The Elephants, 2023) and The Undying Present (Krupskaya, 2015). Recent work is published in Baest, Tripwire, Social Text, and A Perfect Vacuum. Staiti is director of Small Press Traffic and a collective member of Light Field. Seldom Approaches is a collection of poems, transcribed readings, and prose writings spanning nearly a decade, presented asynchronously, and interlaced with narrative passages, both abstract and autobiographical: a book formed and unformed in a process of becoming.