A Sixteen Rivers Press Launch Celebration with Poets Erin Rodoni and Gillian Wegener

reading from new collections, Body, in Good Light and This Sweet Haphazard, respectively. 

Thursday, April 13, 2017 - 7:00pm

About Erin Rodoni’s Body, in Good Light:

Throughout this debut collection, Rodoni distills experience for its essence, rendered in language that is fierce, tender, penetrating in its precision, and astonishing in its turns of phrase. Whether describing “turncoat cells” of cancer, the half-smile scar of a  caesarian, or the alien landscape of childhood seared by wildfire, Rodoni’s poems remind us how tenuous our lives are, how each moment arrives as inescapably painful and miraculous as birth.

“Here is a book that journeys out into the world, and also inward, into the mysteries of private life, of the body, where ‘bliss, like a memory, can be unearthed by scent.’ I love how the wisdom enters the moment of passion in these poems, where we see ourselves living here, on this earth, ‘believing // in these bodies.’ This is a marvelous debut.”—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Dancing In Odessa

Erin Rodoni’s work has appeared in Colorado Review, Cimarron Review, Drunken Boat, Ninth Letter, and Vinyl Poetry, among others. Her poems have also been included in the Best New Poets anthology, featured on Verse Daily, and honored with an Intro Journals Award from the Association of Writers and Writing programs. Born and raised in Point Reyes, Rodoni currently lives in the Bay Area.

About Gillian Wegener’s This Sweet Haphazard:

The poems in This Sweet Haphazard are anything but haphazard in their designs or effects, and while sweetness resides here, it’s a sweetness hard-won by looking at life unflinchingly. Wegener’s gift is to show us that the ever-changing, the temporal, is as close as we’re apt to come to paradise. These are poems that no one will forget, radiating as they do with Central Valley heat, with the beauty of the ordinary, and with the love of a woman for the “sweet haphazard of home,” from which everything here so accurately and ingeniously arises.

“Everything is brimming in Gillian Wegener’s fantastic new collection of poems— rivers, bees, the Old Mill Café, forest fires, churches, Neville Bros. Service, the ghosts of Humboldt County…and most importantly, the unmapped geography of the human heart. Candid and creative, Wegener charts past and present, interior and exterior, in order to create a poetic landscape we never want to leave.”—Dean Rader, author of Works & Days

Gillian Wegener is the author of two previous books of poetry: a chapbook and a full-length collection, The Opposite of Clairvoyance. Widely published, she has won several awards for her work, including the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize in 2006 and 2007 and the Zócalo Public Square Prize for Poetry of Place in 2015. Wegener lives in Modesto where she coordinates and hosts the monthly Second Tuesday Reading Series. She is a cofounder of Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center and has served as the poet laureate for the City of Modesto.

About Sixteen Rivers Press:

Sixteen Rivers Press is poetry collective dedicated to providing an alternative publishing avenue for Bay Area poets. The press is named for the sixteen rivers that flow into San Francisco Bay.

Event address: 
2904 College Avenue
Berkeley, CA 94705