Events

 Poet Jim Powell’s first collection in twenty years examines the indigenous habitat of Northern California, treating history as a kind of sediment. Powell, fascinated by the first person, turns to eyewitness historical accounts and primary witnesses to create a portrait assembled of samples from twenty-five ‘strata’ in the ‘substrate’ of the region.   Largely narrative, Powell’s poems embrace the tradition, borrowing tools from prose and contemporary oral narration. His title poem summons twenty-five witnesses from oral and documentary history, ethnology, archeology, ethnobotany and linguistics, all providing a composite cultural history of California.  Substrate is a vivid, multifaceted volume dazzling in its lush imagery and its linguistic richness.   Jim Powell is the author of It Was Fever That Made the World and the translator of The Poetry of Sappho and Catullan Revenants. He received a CCLM Younger Poets Prize in 1986 and a MacArthur Fellowship (1993-1198), and was the Sherry Poet and Lecturer at the University of Chicago in 2005. He is a fourth generation California native and lifelong resident of the Bay Area.   See David Ulin’s Los Angeles Times’ review.