Lee Herrick and Clea Roberts
Monday June 24, 2019 at 7:30 PM
Sacramento Poetry Center, 1719 25th Street
Host: Tim Kahl
Lee Herrick is the author of three books of poems, Scar and Flower, Gardening Secrets of the Dead, and This Many Miles from Desire. He is co-editor, with Leah Silvieus, of The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit (forthcoming Spring 2020, Orison Books). He served as Fresno Poet Laureate from 2015-2017. His poems appear widely in literary magazines, anthologies, and textbooks including The Bloomsbury Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, The Normal School, The Poetry Foundation, ZZYZYVA, Seeds from a Silent Tree: Writing by Korean Adoptees, Highway 99: A Literary Journey Through California’s Great Central Valley, 2nd edition, The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems from the San Francisco Bay Watershed, One for the Money: The Sentence as Poetic Form, Indivisible: Poems of Social Justice, and HERE: Poems for the Planet, with a foreword by the Dalai Lama (Copper Canyon, March 2019), among others. Herrick is on the advisory board of The Adoption Museum Project and has traveled throughout Latin America and Asia and has given readings throughout the United States. He was born in Daejeon, South Korea, adopted at ten months old, and raised in California. He lives with his daughter and wife in Fresno, California. He teaches at Fresno City College and in the MFA Program at Sierra Nevada College.
Echolocation
What a miracle it would be
to echolocate like a bat,
to shriek and have the shriek
bounce back to alert us
to the oncoming train, the wrong person,
or a year of trouble.
The organism which hears best
is the Greater Wax Moth,
which can hear 100 kHz more
than the bat, which preys on the moth.
And what do we hear, with poor night
vision and no ability for flight?
Can you hear your lover hum near the stove?
You are one of many species who can whistle.
Pigeons hear lower frequencies
and can detect coming storms.
Dogs can differentiate between their owners’
footsteps and a stranger’s.
And what have you heard tonight,
the low sigh of your father’s fatigue,
the scrape of a brush on the canvas,
the echo of your singular breathing.
from Hyphen
Clea Roberts lives on the outskirts of Whitehorse, Yukon Territory. Her debut collection of poems, Here Is Where We Disembark (Freehand Books, 2010), was a finalist for the League of Canadian Poets’ Gerald Lampert Award, was nominated for the ReLit Award, and was translated into German and Japanese. Clea’s poems have been published in journals and anthologies in Canada, Europe, the United States, and Australia. She facilitates a workshop on poetry and grief through Hospice Yukon and is the Artistic Director of the Kicksled Reading Series.
from Transmutation
It was a thin winter
for rabbits, and therefore
a thin winter for lynx.
—–
February ate
a cord of wood,
a snow shovel,
and a beaver hat.
—–
The swans came back
when they came back,
their broad wings scraping
