Please join us in the Modesto Library’s Makerspace on Saturday, June 24, 2023 from 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. for “Questions, Lies, & Repetition,” a poetry writing workshop facilitated by Linda Scheller. Participants will read, discuss, and write poetry in this free, in-person workshop open to the public. All ages are welcome, and no prior poetry experience is required!
Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Bryan Medina, Joseph Rios, Michael Meyerhofer, and Kenneth Chacón
Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center presents Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Four Fresno Poets: Bryan Medina, Joseph Rios, Michael Meyerhofer, and Kenneth Chacón.
Hosted by Gillian Wegener
Date: Tuesday, May 9, 2022
Time: 7:00 pm PDT
on Zoom–RSVP required:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZAuceuuqDIjG9D7nH7UsdTrO5qDQlW6f7Lp
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
Bryan Medina
Bryan Medina has been a fixture in the Fresno literary community for over 25 years. A former student of California Poet Laureate Emeritus Juan Felipe Herrera, his poetry has graced stages in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Kansas City. He founded the Inner Ear Poetry Slam as a way to free poetry from the confines of academic institutions, making it accessible to all. Bryan has been awarded two City of Fresno Commendations for contributions to Fresno’s rich artistic and cultural heritage and has been featured as one of the four “Fresno Poets” from writer Nick Belardes’s Distinguished Valley Writers series as well as appeared in journals such as Poetry, Flies, Cockroaches, and Poets, In The Grove, The San Joaquin Review, Jubilee, and Invisible Memoirs and was an Honorable Mention in the ‘06 Larry Levis Poetry Prize. He is a graduate of Fresno Pacific University and teaches Special Education.
Joseph Rios
Born in Clovis, Joseph Rios is the author of Shadowboxing: Poems and Impersonations (Omnidawn), winner of the American Book Award; he was named one of the Notable Debut Poets by Poets & Writers Magazine for 2017. His poems can be found at Poem A Day, Huizache, The Rumpus, the San Francisco Chronicle, and on Metro buses and trains in Los Angeles. He was recently named a Stegner Fellow by Stanford University. He lives in Fresno.
Michael Meyerhofer
Michael Meyerhofer’s fifth book, Ragged Eden, was published by Glass Lyre Press. He has been the startled recipient of fourteen national writing awards including the James Wright Poetry Award, the Liam Rector First Book Award, the Brick Road Poetry Book Prize, and several chapbook prizes. His work has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry, Rattle, Brevity, Ploughshares, Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, and other journals. He is also the author of a fantasy series.
Kennth Chacón
Kenneth Chacón is the author of The Cholo Who Said Nothing & Other Poems(Turning Point, 2017). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Colorado Review, Cimarron Review, Palette Poetry, Blackbird, and Huizache among others. Chacón is a native of Fresno, California and teaches English at Fresno City College.
MoSt Poetry Reading
To celebrate National Poetry Month, MoSt Poetry will have a reading featuring poets who serve on our non-profit’s board followed by an open mic. Please join us at 1:00 p.m. PT on Saturday, April 22, 2023 in the Stanislaus County Library. This event is free and open to the public.
MoSt Poetry Book Club
MoSt Poetry Book Club will meet at 5:30 p.m. on Monday, April 24 in person at the downtown Modesto library. We’ll be reading Katie Farris’ book Standing in the Forest of Being Alive, available at the library reference desk to borrow after April 4th.
Second Tuesday Poetry featuring 2023 Sixteen Rivers Press authors Matthew M. Monte & Joseph Zaccardi
We are so excited to feature Matthew M. Monte and Joseph Zaccardi for our Second Tuesday reading on April 11, 2023.
Please RSVP to get Zoom link for reading: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUodeGrrzkjHdfBfZG3JJnhhyxHl8NFvfZ8
Hosted by Modesto poet laureate emeritus Stella Beratlis; open mic follows featured poets. (Open mic sign-up.)
MATTHEW MONTE
Matthew M. Monte grew up near San Francisco, California and went to the University of Hawaii-Manoa, where he studied botany. His fiction, poetry, book reviews, music reviews, journalism, and essays have appeared in Sidestream, Creosote Journal, Transfer, Ashcan Magazine, The Snackbar Collective, iNaturalist, Panorama, and the Poets 11 Anthologies (2014 and 2016). He lives in San Francisco with his wife and son. His debut collection, The Case of the Six-Sided Dream, won the 2017 Blue Light Poetry Prize.
https://www.matthew-monte.com/
All Tomorrow’s Train Rides is an odyssey of reading and poetic memory. What begins as a single day in a worker’s commute morphs into a Möbius loop of literary history and cultural consciousness. “Where do we read and whom?” is a question that drives the nostalgia, dread, and humor of this collection. Riddled with geographical coordinates and commentary, this book of interdependent poems explores the idea of “living in translation” and fuses the formal aesthetics of cartography to our relationships with people, places, books, and the natural world.
About ALL TOMORROW’S TRAIN RIDES
Through poetic cartography, Matthew Monte disembarks from a search of what ultimately is borderless. The topography of a land, of home, extending from San Francisco to Tepeyac to Downe places us in a position to feel the transit of time. We travel to where Monte coordinates the lingering as well as the vanishing points of a city. With a lush lexicon, he fuses historical allusions with aspects of spirituality to expound upon what each train ride reveals; in turn, around the next bend, we keep coming back. This is a ride to catch.
—Thea Matthews, author of Unearth [The Flowers]
Matthew Monte writes in the specifics of speech and memory, pulling the reader along his urban coastline of abandoned dreams and possible destinations. This extraordinary book is filled with the noise and silence of the everyday and is underscored throughout with beauty, examination, and compassion.
Read these fine poems and encounter some part of your own unvoiced life.
—Beau Beausoleil, author of A Glyphic House: New and Selected Poems 1976–2019
JOSEPH ZACCARDI
Joseph Zaccardi is the author of five books of poetry including, most recently, The Weight of Bodily Touches from Kelsay Books. His poems have appeared in Cincinnati Review, Poetry East, Atlanta Review, Rattle, and Salamander, among other journals. Zaccardi joined the Marin Poetry Center in 1996 and served as a board member from 2010 to 2013 and as the editor of the Marin Poetry Center Anthology in 2010–2012. Appointed poet laureate of Marin County, California, he served from 2013 to 2015. A member of the LGBTQ community, Zaccardi believes that to write a single poem is a minor miracle. He lives in Fairfax, California, with his husband, Dave, and their dog.
In his afterword to Songbirds of the Nine Rivers, Joseph Zaccardi recounts how, during his time as a Navy corpsman in the Vietnam War, he found refuge in a volume of ancient Chinese and Vietnamese poetry. His study, now lifelong, has borne fruit in this present volume, the ancients at his shoulder. At once a scholarly work, an homage, and a striking volume of new poems—not translations, not “versions”— this book provides readers with a multifaceted lens, forward, backward, yet always present—and always, even in grief, exultant.
About SONGBIRDS OF THE NINE RIVERS
The beauty of this book is in the lyric surprise, the parabolic of the Tang. If there are such things as true works of art, it is these poems that blend the physical and the eternal, the seen and the unseen. Zaccardi’s words draw from the uncanniness of nature in a startling way and reveal to us a sometimes violent, often beautiful, but always necessary world. A work such as Songbirds of the Nine Rivers,derived from both earth and heaven, is rare indeed.
––Ann Robinson, author of Stone Window
Historical, philosophical, and alchemical, these poems reenact the cosmos of the classical poet-ancestors of China and Vietnam through the awakened mind of an American poet. Joseph Zaccardi’s poetry enlarges human empathy and connects separated worlds. Listen to these songs! Every note is clear, fresh, and alive.
-–Jie Tian, author of Native Songs and Migration Songs
It is said that to hear music it is best to close your eyes, and that to hear poetry it is best to read the poems aloud. Joseph Zaccardi’s poetry is music to the ear. He lets us feel what he feels, lets us touch what he touches. His voice is song; his sounds are prayers. They wash over me, the way the sea washes over the sound of itself.
––Mai Sato, Yokohama College of Art and Design