A New Cadence In May

A New Cadence Poetry Series

Presents:

Joseph Lease & Melissa Reeser

reading from their works

Saturday, may 19th

@

Louden Nelson Center : 301 Center Street, Santa Cruz, CA 95060 : 7:30pm

Admission is free

Joseph Lease is the author of two critically acclaimed collections of poetry: Human Rights and The Room. His work has been featured on npr and published in The AGNI 30th Anniversary Poetry Anthology, VQR, Bay Poetics, Paris Review, and elsewhere. The title poem from Broken World appeared in The Best American Poetry, edited by Robert Creeley and David Lehman. Originally from Chicago, Lease lives in the Bay area and chairs the mfa Program in Writing at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.

“The poems in Joseph Lease’s Broken World are as cool as they are passionate, as soft-spoken as they are indignant, and as fiercely Romantic as they are formally contained. Whether writing an elegy for a friend who died of aids or playing complex variations on Rilke’s Duino Elegies (‘If I cried out, / Who among the angelic orders would / Slap my face, who would steal my / Lunch money’), Lease has complete command of his poetic materials. His poems are spellbinding in their terse and ironic authority: Yes, the reader feels when s/he has finished, this is how it was—and how it is. An exquisite collection!”

—MARJORIE PERLOFF

Melissa Reeser is a graduate of the UCSC Creative Writing program. Her eclectic resume includes checking at grocery stores, working the front desk at a gym, hosting events at the Capitola Book Cafe, and gardening at the Ashtanga Yoga Institute. She has been writing poetry since the age of seven. She will be teaching English in Paris starting in the fall. She loves French food, Moroccan music, and the ocean.

for further information, contact james maughn @ 831-336-5409 or jamaughn@cabrillo.edu or See anewcadence@blogspot.com