Advertisement
This is a free event, but we appreciate your RSVP as that helps us plan for your attendance.ABOUT THE BOOK
These poems, alternately gritty and transcendent, find the spirit in our stark, hardscrabble lives.
Nominated for the 2020 Northern California Book Award in Poetry
“This is an incredible, luminous and most serious investigation, of being, of human suffering, of war and peace — of the factories of violence and the notebook of enlightenments. We deepen into spirit and lives lost. Lee is concerned with the turning of beauty, the intimacy of death and the boundlessness of small moments, “the broken body of a tiny bird,” fragments that can change a life. Glitterings of light, planetary systems, electric skies available and unavailable. He is the “form rider” of hope. A stellar project, here. Rare and gifted, a timely arrival. Life-deep brilliance.” - Praise from Juan Felipe Herrera, U.S. Poet Laureate (2015-2017)
“Lee Herrick is a poet of the ecstatic. In this collection, he reminds us that the body has its own light-filled astronomy, that the body is also a torrent of terror and desire. Here are furious elegies about the way America is on fire with its bombs and guns and false prayers. Herrick gathers stray echoes, a myriad of birds, the motherless ocean, and much more into A stellar project, here. Rare and gifted, a timely arrival. Life-deep brilliance. And yet, so much love, because grief is a coin spent in the currency of love. This poet is an unapologetic patriot in the vast country of love, a place of abundance in the aching language of both scars and flowers.” - Praise from Sun Yung Shin
“Lee Herrick’s visionary, ocean-hearted third collection stares down the forces sweeping through North America—and dares to listen to the howl. Here is the father dreaming despite daily violence in a country under siege. Scar and Flower crosses continents and oceans, translates moonlight, and reckons with what it means to be alive, and lost, and in love with fire-light at the beginning of the 21st century. From bullets to bonfires, daughter-love and a farmer’s ars poetica, the landscapes conjured here haunt our waking dreams, much like the boy with a gun who wanders, painfully, through these pages. All the while, Herrick’s singular voice and vision propels us forward—sound over sound, rose over rose—as if to say: motion is resistance, and listening, the one true act of grace. A mighty, tender, and fearless book from a poet at the height of his powers.” - Praise from Brynn Saito
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lee Herrick is the California Poet Laureate. He is the author of three books of poems: Scar and Flower, finalist for the 2020 Northern California Book Award; Gardening Secrets of the Dead; and This Many Miles from Desire.
He is co-editor of The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit (Orison Books 2020). His poems appear widely, in The Poetry Foundation, Academy of American Poets, The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems from the San Francisco Bay Watershed, Indivisible: Poems of Social Justice with a foreword by Common, HERE: Poems for the Planet, with a foreword by the Dalai Lama, and Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, among others. Herrick serves on the advisory board of Terrain.org and Sixteen Rivers Press. He co-founded LitHop in Fresno. He has taught in Qingdao, China, and for Kundiman.
He was born in Daejeon, Korea and adopted as an infant. He lives with his family in Fresno, California and served as Fresno Poet Laureate from 2015-2017. He teaches at Fresno City College and in the low-residency MFA program at University of Nevada Reno at Lake Tahoe. He is the 10th California Poet Laureate, and the first Asian American to serve in the role.
IN CONVERSATION WITH KATHLEEN PATTERSON OF POETRY BOOK CLUB
Advertisement
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
1625 2nd St, Napa, CA, United States, California 94559
Tickets
