Poetry Flash features Isaacson, Norman, Romanelli and Steckel
Schedule
Thu May 02 2024 at 07:00 pm
Location
Art House Gallery & Cultural Center | Berkeley, CA
You're invited to Poetry Flash on Thursday, May 2, 7 PM, at the Art House Gallery and Cultural Center, 2905 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley, CA, hosted by Poetry Flash editor Joyce Jenkins. Featured are Zeitgeist Press publisher and author Bruce Isaacson, Zeitgeist editor and author James Norman, and Zeitgeist authors Andrew Romanelli and Jan Steckel."[Bruce Isaacson] uses ‘pop’ language and images from news media, advertising, chews it up and spits it back, for subversion, and no one is slicker or deadlier at that than lsaacson… the ideal poetic guerilla… a master of irony, the offbeat metaphor, poems that keep on ticking on the mind after they end in a sudden silence.”
-Richard Silberg, Poetry Flash
James Norman assumes the open road would recall his name. Musician, part-time lover—a heterodoxical historian of the forgotten, a half-assed Buddhist in his concrete monastery, a traveling freak show feeding LSD to a higher consciousness—Contradictions are the meat on the bones that construct him. James Norman was born to a Navy Man, and the sea never quite left him. His mother was the son of a preacher, though no God has ever claimed him. His mountain is too tall for flags anyway. He has lived in cabins surrounded by forests of marijuana, in that steel onion called ship bobbing across the Atlantic, in squalid houses owned by unscrupulous men chasing the Almighty American Dollar far past the point of no return. He owes everything to the women in his life, starting with Jean. He is a lover of animals (even the human kind.) He hopes you enjoy his musings about Armageddon, though he believes that inevitably we make it out alive to tell the story ourselves. I suppose he believes in the story more than anything else. Most of his poems are instructions for how to survive the desert of self for long enough to understand the thirst that drives us, and he wrote them solely to make it through till morning.
Andrew Romanelli was born and raised in Las Vegas and has lived in many of its historic areas, currently residing downtown. He is a product of the Family Court system, Special Education, and a Mental Hospital. Obtaining his GED at 16 (the year they lowered the age) and over a decade later his BA in English at Nevada State. His first (above table) job was through local 226 at the Showboat Hotel & Casino as a graveyard shift bus boy. Since then, he has held (and lost) a vast array of jobs and currently works for a local printer as a guy who does whatever is needed. He is an activist for the disenfranchised, a teaching artist through Poetry Promise and a proud wobblie. He is a John Oliver Simon award recipient among other recognitions. His first poetry collection, Rotgut, was published by Zeitgeist Press in 2022 and his chapbook Supermarket Poems was released in 2023.
Jan Steckel’s debut fiction collection Ghosts and Oceans came out from Zeitgeist Press in 2023. Her poetry book The Horizontal Poet (Zeitgeist Press, 2011) won a 2012 Lambda Literary Award. Her poetry book Like Flesh Covers Bone (Zeitgeist Press, 2018) won two Rainbow Awards. Her fiction chapbook Mixing Tracks (Gertrude Press, 2009) and poetry chapbook The Underwater Hospital (Zeitgeist Press, 2006) also won awards. Her creative prose and poetry have appeared in Scholastic Magazine, Yale Medicine, Bellevue Literary Review, Canary, Assaracus and elsewhere. She lives in Oakland, California.