Kate Greenstreet and Linda Norton

Kate Greenstreet and Linda Norton

Monday, March 25 at 7:30 PM
1719 25th Street at Sacramento Poetry Center
Host: Tim Kahl

Kate Greenstreet is currently on the road with her new book Young Tambling. Her previous books are case sensitive and The Last 4 Things, all from Ahsahta Press. Her poetry can be found in Colorado Review, Boston Review, Guernica, Fence, Chicago Review, and other journals. She is also the auteur of some of the most innovative poem videos in the US. For more information, visit her site at kickingwind.com.

from Young Tambling

Light by six.
Like everyone, she’s simple.

I understand her crazy trust.
But how can these tricks work?

Parks
at night

are always dangerous.
And our will. Free will.

She cuts herself. I never got close
to that.

The dog
has seen it all.

Linda Norton is the author of THE PUBLIC GARDENS: POEMS AND HISTORY  (Pressed Wafer, 2011; introduction by Fanny Howe), a hybrid work of poetry and memoir and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for poetry, 2012.

Her writing and collages have appeared on the covers of many books and in many journals including Eleven Eleven and Naropa’s online zine, Not Enough Night. New work will be published in Zen Monster and The Berkeley Poetry Review.

Norton’s writing is also included in the anthologies AS IF IT FELL FROM THE SUN (EtherDome, 2012), and AL-MUTANABBI STREET STARTS HERE (PM Press, 2012); and will be featured in NEW CALIFORNIA WRITING (Heyday Books, 2013). She has also published a chapbook, HESITATION KIT (EtherDome Press, 2007).

For links to a Kenyon Review interview, poems at the poetryfoundation.org, and reviews of THE PUBLIC GARDENS, please go to thepublicgardens.blogspot.com.

The Public Gardens

Get wisdom! Get understanding!
Do not turn away from the words
of my mouth.
—Proverbs, 4:05

Not knowing any better
I took it for a blade of grass
and walked into poetry
in search of a place to rest,
a place to suffer formally,
a glade.

Now I am bleeding,
my mouth especially.

I cry out to tourists entering the gardens
with cameras and guidebooks,
shields and blinders:
“See how beautiful it is to suffer!
Look, I have become a rose!”

Linda Norton, from THE PUBLIC GARDENS: POEMS AND HISTORY, (Pressed Wafer, 2011)