Poetry Book Club
2021-04-21 18:30 - 19:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Zoom
Join us for the latest edition of the MoSt Poetry Book Club! We’ll meet on Wednesday, April 21st at 6:30 pm. In the meantime, pick up a copy of Indigo Moor’s excellent new collection, Everybody’s Jonesin’ for Something, now available at the front desk of the Modesto Library. Tom Myers and Tom Portwood will lead a discussion about the collection that evening. Please join us!
Zoom link: https://cccconfer.zoom.us/j/92507601303

Poetry Book Club
2021-07-07 18:30 - 19:30 | Zoom
Join host Gary Thomas for a discussion of The Wild Fox of Yemen by Threa Almontaser, published by Graywolf Press (2021) and winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets in 2020, selected by Harryette Mullen. 5 copies of the book are available (while they last) to check out at the Modesto Library (1500 I Street.)
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Coffee, Tea, and Poetry with Sal Salerno
2021-08-22 16:00 - 17:00 | Zoom
Join Modesto Poet Laureate Sal Salerno & friends at 4 pm, and bring along some poetry you’ve been reading to share with others.
Topic: Coffee, Tea, and Poetry
Time: Aug 22, 2021 04:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)

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Coffee, Tea, and Poetry
2021-09-19 16:00 - 17:00 | CA
Join Modesto Poet Laureate Salvatore Salerno and share a few poems from a book you’re currently reading or an old favorite.

Topic: Coffee, Tea, and Poetry
Time: Sep 19, 2021 04:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)

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Poetry Book Discussion: Laure-Ann Bosselaar's THESE MANY ROOMS
2021-11-17 18:30 - 19:30 | CA
“Think of it: the worlds in this world. “ L.A. Bosselaar
Come join us for conservation about Laure-Anne Bosselaar ‘s most recent book of poetry, These Many Rooms. There will be readings of her poetry during our time together which will be on Zoom, November 17, 2021 at 6:30, facilitated by Janette Jameson.
Prior reading of the book is NOT a requirement of joining us! This is an opportunity simply to learn about the poet and her work.
Laure-Anne Bosselaar is a Belgian-American poet, translator, professor, and former poet laureate of Santa Barbara, California. She is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently, These Many Rooms (Four Way Books, 2019). Her collection, Small Gods of Grief (BOA Editions), won the 2001 Isabella Gardner Prize for Poetry. A New Hunger, (Ausable Press 2008) was an American Library Association Notable Book in 2008.
She grew up in Belgium, and moved to the United States in 1987. She earned her M.F.A. from the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. She taught poetry workshops in Colorado and co-directed the Aspen Writers’ Conference from 1989 to 1992. She is fluent in four languages, and has published poems in French and Flemish. She was a Breadloaf Fellow, was awarded the McEver Chair at Georgia Tech, taught at Emerson College, Sarah Lawrence College, at the College of Creative Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara, and is part of the founding faculty at the Solstice Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program of Pine Manor College. She is the widow of poet Kurt Brown and currently lives in Santa Barbara, California
Copies of the book will be available from the Modesto Library–ask at check-out desk or call (209) 558-7808.
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Coffee, Tea, and Poetry
2022-01-30 16:00 - 17:00 | CA
Coffee, Tea, and Poetry Sunday, January 30, 2022 4:00 P. M. (PST) hosted by MoSt Board member/Modesto Poet Laureate Sal Salerno.
It’s a very enjoyable chance to share a couple of poems from a new or favorite poetry book you’re reading now while learning about what other poetry folk are reading as you sip your favorite afternoon beverage!
Register in advance for this event:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0vd-2orT8tHdB4O3aPQT3jxtskobmOxdAG
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

MoSt Poetry Book Club
2022-02-23 18:30 - 19:30 | CA
Dust Bowl Venus by Stella Beratlis (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2021)
Join our online discussion of Dust Bowl Venus by Stella Beratlis on Wednesday, February 23, 2022 at 6:30pm PT. Prior reading is not required. Copies of the book are available to borrow at the circulation desk of the Modesto Stanislaus County Library. To check on the books’ status, please call 209-558-7808.
Register in advance for the Zoom link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0vc-Gtqz0pHdQn9dapR_G_8EvWCeuvrtvg

“With tenderness, wit and humor, Dust Bowl Venus explores the fragility of love, good health an:d the earth. Rooted not just in the places of the City of Modesto but also in the music, legends, and community of the Central Valley, these poems brilliantly reflect a struggle to find beauty in the contradictions of our contemporary lives. Amazingly thoughtful and musical, these are poems we should all read.” —July Halebsky, author of Sky=Empty, Tree Line, and Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged)
“Stella Beratlis’s Dust Bowl Venus animates California’s Central Valley as a postmodern Prometheus, an eco-sapient Frankenstein with whom we wrangle, wrestle, and fall madly in love. Marked with sass and grit and grace, Beratlis’s imagistic associations jolt and jump cut in powers of ten. These poems stir us with the urgency of the Anthropocene, excite ‘a thicket of nerves,’ and form a ‘mycorrhizal web’ that connects us to the mantle of deep time.” —Rosa Lane, author of Chouteau’s Chalk and Tiller North
“The poems in Stella Beratlis’s Dust Bowl Venus ring with the clarity of a shovel strike against stone, each line cracking against the next, igniting spark after glorious spark. And yet, like the seasonal lake bed on which Modesto sits, like the many hands ‘making mud out of dry soil,; every poem aches toward tenderness. In one poem, Beratlis asks ‘What grows here?’ before revealing the bounty—heirloom tomatoes, holy basil, kindness—that can be coaxed from this ‘city of drought.’ But darker things grow here, too: a tumor ‘the consistency of a potato,’ fear, terror that ‘builds cell by sticky cell.’ Here, to grow, and to love, is to risk vulnerability. These ‘bone and ligament narratives’ of grief and yearning, illness and healing, perseverance and resistance, beat with so much heart in this fiercely beautiful book.” —Erin Rodoni, author of Body, in Good Light and A Landscape for Loss

Stella Beratlis grew up in a second-generation Greek-American family in Northern California. Her latest collection, Dust Bowl Venus, was published in May 2021. She is also the author of Alkali Sink (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2015). Her work has also appeared in numerous journals, including Harbor Review, Penumbra, Song of the San Joaquin, In-Posse Review, and California Quarterly, as well as in the anthologies The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems from the San Francisco Bay Watershed (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2010) and California Fire and Water: A Climate Crisis Anthology (Story Streets, 2020). She is coeditor of the collection More Than Soil, More Than Sky: The Modesto Poets (Quercus Review Press, 2011) and served as the poet laureate of Modesto from 2016–2020. Beratlis lives in Modesto and is a librarian there.
You are invited to a Zoom meeting.
When: Feb 23, 2022 06:30 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)
Register in advance for this meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0vc-Gtqz0pHdQn9dapR_G_8EvWCeuvrtvg
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

MoSt Poetry Book Club: Amanda Moore's Requeening
2022-04-18 18:30 - 19:30 | Stanislaus County Library, 1500 I Street, Modesto, CA, 95354, United States
The MoSt Poetry Book Club will continue in April with a discussion of Amanda Moore’s book Requeening (Ecco Press, 2021). Copies can be borrowed at the reference desk of the downtown Modesto Library. The Book Club will meet IN PERSON on Monday, April 18 at 6:30 in the MakerSpace room. We hope to see you there!

MoSt Poetry Book Club Vantage by Taneum Bambrick
2022-07-20 16:30 - 17:30 | Stanislaus County Library, 1500 I Street, Modesto, CA, 95354, United States
MoSt Poetry Book Club will meet Wednesday, July 20, 2022 at 4:30 pm Pacific at the Modesto Stanislaus County Library downstairs in the Maker’s Space. Sara Coito will lead a discussion of this month’s selection, Vantage by Taneum Bambrick. One or two copies of the book are still available to borrow at the library desk.
Winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize, selected by Sharon Olds (who writes the introduction), Vantage is a fictionalized account of the poet’s time spent working as the only woman on a six-person garbage crew around the reservoirs of two massive dams. Bambrick began writing poems in order to document the forms of violence she witnessed towards the people and the environment of the Columbia River. Power—literal and metaphorical—runs through the collection and its stories, as Bambrick finds connection across the lines.

MoSt Poetry Book Club
2022-11-21 18:30 - 19:30 | Stanislaus County Library, 1500 I Street, Modesto, CA, 95354, United States
Monday, November 21, 2022 6:30-7:30 p.m.
Stanislaus County Library Makerspace 1500 I Street, Modesto
The Hurting Kind by Ada Limón
Join host Gary Thomas for a discussion of The Hurting Kind by Ada Limón, the author of six books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Limón is also the host of the critically-acclaimed poetry podcast, The Slowdown. Her new book of poetry, The Hurting Kind, is out now from Milkweed Editions. She is the 24th Poet Laureate of The United States.
5 copies of the book are available (while they last) to check out at the Modesto Library (1500 I Street.).
An astonishing collection about interconnectedness—between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves—from National Book Critics Circle Award winner, National Book Award finalist, and U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón.
“I have always been too sensitive, a weeper / from a long line of weepers,” writes Limón. “I am the hurting kind.” What does it mean to be the hurting kind? To be sensitive not only to the world’s pain and joys, but to the meanings that bend in the scrim between the natural world and the human world? To divine the relationships between us all? To perceive ourselves in other beings—and to know that those beings are resolutely their own, that they “do not / care to be seen as symbols”?

“Ada Limón’s sixth and latest collection is a testament to the power of sensitivity. As with her previous award-winning books, The Carrying and Bright Dead Things, these poems are acutely aware of the natural world. And Limón has a knack for acknowledging nature’s little mysteries in order to fully capture its history and abundance. For her, evidence of poetry is everywhere. She connects big ideas – fear, isolation, even death – with little details, like field sparrows, a box of matches or “the body moving / freely.” Above all, The Hurting Kind asks for our attention to stay tender.” NPR, Books We Love
“”Poetry readers have come to expect greatness from Limón, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and finalist for the National Book Award, and that is exactly what the author offers in The Hurting Kind. . . . My most brief statement on the quality of this collection is this: If you have space to teach just one book of poetry, make it The Hurting Kind. . . . What Limón manages with The Hurting Kind is rare; the poems are at once highly specific and yet broadly relatable, both technically masterful and easily comprehensible. In sum, this collection works equally well for both the avid poetry enthusiast and the reluctant reader. If I was going to try and convince someone that poetry is our most important verbal art, I would start with The Hurting Kind. . . . The Hurting Kind is a collection that begs to be shared, and one that will inevitably show signs of wear as readers carry it with them for weeks at a time.”—The Poetry Question

Book Discussion: Lee Herrick's Scar & Flower
2023-01-23 18:30 - 19:30 | CA
Join us at the Modesto Library to discuss Lee’s collection Scar and Flower. Copies available at the service desk at the downtown library. You don’t need to have read the book to join us!

MoSt Poetry Book Club
2023-04-24 17:30 - 18:30 | Stanislaus County Library, 1500 I Street, Modesto, CA, 95354, United States
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.

July Book Club: FELON by Reginald Dwayne Betts
2023-07-24 17:30 - 18:30 | Stanislaus County Library, 1500 I Street, Modesto, CA, 95354, United States
Please join at the Modesto Library to discuss Felon: Poems by Reginald Dwayne Betts. Copies of the book are available at the check-out desk of the Modesto Library, courtesy of Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center. Facilitated by Tina Marie Curiel-Vega.

MoSt Poetry Book Club
2023-11-13 18:30 - 19:30 | Stanislaus County Library, 1500 I Street, Modesto, CA, 95354, United States
“The late W.S. Merwin might as well have been called Merlin, for the seemingly magical changes of his work during his long career. The poems in Present Company are like impressionist or even abstract paintings. If you scan them quickly, they will seem to be out of focus, but if you read more slowly, stopping and lingering, your patience will be rewarded by their beauty.”

MoSt Poetry Book Club - Information Desk by Robyn Schiff
2024-02-17 10:00 - 11:00 | BakeShop, 940 Eleventh Street, Modesto, CA, 95354, United States
MoSt Poetry Book Club meets at 10:00 a.m. on Saturday, February 17, 2024 at BakeShop, 11th Street in downtown Modesto to discuss Information Desk by Robyn Schiff. You can pick up a copy of the book at the Stanislaus County Library’s Modesto Branch. Here’s what the publisher, Penguin Random House, has to say:

ABOUT INFORMATION DESK
New York Times Book Review Edtitors’ Choice
“Among the year’s highlights . . . groundbreaking, epic . . . Like visitors exiting the Met’s galleries, readers will emerge from Information Desk bedazzled by the transformative horizons of art.” —Washington Post
“An effluvial rush of memory, desire, data, and metaphor . . . It’s bracing to encounter a mind so voracious, so unapologetic in its intelligence.” —New York Review of Books
A book-length poem set in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, from a writer whose work offers “something few poets ever discover: a vision of the whole world” (Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker)
Robyn Schiff’s fourth collection is an ambitious book-length poem in three parts set at The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s information desk, where Schiff long ago held a staff position. Elaborately mapping an interconnected route in and out of the museum through history, material, and memory, Information Desk: An Epic takes us on an anguished soul-quest and ecstatic intellectual query to confront the violent forces that inform the museum’s encyclopedic collection and the spiritual powers of art.
Novelistic in its sweep, frantically informative, and deeply intimate in its private recollections, Information Desk: An Epic wayfares with riveting lyric intensity through an epic array of topics and concerns, including illusion, deception, self-deception, complicity, lecherous coworkers, the composition of pigment, the scattering of seeds, ideas, and capital, and insect infestations spreading within artwork. Along the way, Schiff pauses to invoke three terrifying muses—parasitic wasps—in desperate awe of their powers of precision and generative energy. Information Desk: An Epic undertakes a hemorrhaging ekphrastic journey through artifice and the natural world.

MoSt Poetry Book Club
2024-04-22 18:30 - 19:30 | Stanislaus County Library, 1500 I Street, Modesto, CA, 95354, United States
Join host Salvatore Salerno for a discussion of The Art of Drowning by Billy Collins, U.S. Poet Laureate Emeritus. MoSt Book Club will meet Monday, April 22, 2024 at 6:30 p.m. in the Maker Space of the Stanislaus County Library, 1500 I Street, Modesto CA. Participants may pick up a free copy of The Art of Drowning at the library reference desk prior to the meeting. This MoSt event is free and open to the public.

Poetry Book Club--Modern Poetry by Diane Seuss
2024-07-27 10:00 - 11:00 | BakeShop, 940 Eleventh Street, Modesto, CA, 95354, United States
Please join us at 10:00 a.m. Saturday, July 27, 2024 at Bakeshop, 940 Eleventh Street in Modesto for MoSt Poetry Book Club. Linda Scheller will facilitate a discussion of Modern Poetry, the latest collection by Diane Seuss. Copies are available at the Modesto Library main desk. You’re always more than welcome to come and enjoy the discussion whether or not you’ve read the book! This event is free and open to the public.
“Diane Seuss’s signature voice—audacious in its honesty, virtuosic in its artistry, outsider in its attitude—has become one of the most original in contemporary poetry. Her latest collection takes its title, Modern Poetry, from the first textbook Seuss encountered as a child and the first poetry course she took in college, as an enrapt but ill-equipped student, one who felt poetry was beyond her reach. Many of the poems make use of the forms and terms of musical and poetic craft—ballad, fugue, aria, refrain, coda—and contend with the works of writers overrepresented in textbooks and anthologies and those too often underrepresented. Seuss provides a moving account of her picaresque years and their uncertainties, and in the process, she enters the realm between Modernism and Romanticism, between romance and objectivity, with Keats as ghost, lover, and interlocutor.” —https://www.graywolfpress.org/books/modern-poetry

Diane Seuss is the author of six books of poetry, including Modern Poetry; frank: sonnets, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the PEN/Voelcker Prize; Still Life With Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Four-Legged Girl, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She was a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, and in 2021 she received the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Michigan.

Poetry Book Club: In Praise of Late Wonder by Lee Herrick
2024-11-17 14:00 - 15:00 | Panera, 2103 McHenry A, Modesto, CA, 95350, United States
Join us for the latest edition of the MoSt Poetry Book Club, when we’ll be discussing California Poet Laureate Lee Herrick’s excellent new collection, In Praise of Late Wonder! We’ll meet on Sunday, November 17th, 2024 at 2pm, at Panera Bread, 2103 McHenry Avenue, in Modesto.
In the meantime, pick up a copy of Lee’s book, which is now available at the front desk of the Modesto Library. Tom Portwood will lead a discussion about the collection that afternoon. We look forward to seeing you!

Second Tuesday: Members' Holiday Open Mic & Potluck
2024-12-10 18:00 - 19:30 | The Dragonfly Art for Life, 1210 J Street, Modesto, CA, 95350, United States
The Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center presents Second Tuesday: Members’ Holiday Open Mic and Potluck. Bring a dish to share, and help us celebrate 15 years of bringing poetry to the community through our Second Tuesday series. If you’re not a MoSt member yet, you are warmly encouraged to attend and join us at the door.
On Tuesday, December 10 at the Dragonfly Art for Life, 1210 J Street, Modesto CA 95354.
MoSt Poetry is proud to serve our community with free poetry events, including the Second Tuesday Poetry series, Poetry on Saturdays at the Carnegie Arts Center, Free Summer Poetry Workshops at the Library, New Year’s Poetry Challenge, Poetry Everywhere initiative at Stanislaus County K-12 public schools, and more. Programs we administer or in which we partner include Poetry Out Loud, Aileen Jaffa Youth Poetry Contest, Stanislaus County Youth Poet Laureate, and the City of Modesto’s Poets’ Corner Contest.
On Facebook, Instagram, and Threads: @mostpoetry.
