Author: allison burris
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Reading through the Oakland Public Library’s poetry collection. Let’s journey back to 1968 today with George Huitt Atwood’s Thunder in the Room. Normally I start off these posts with a short introduction on the poet, but the only biographical information I could find on Atwood was on the inside jacket. He was born in 1919,…
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Reading through the Oakland Public Library’s poetry collection. We’re talking about another new volume of poetry today, published in 2021: You Better Be Lightning by Andrea Gibson.. Andrea Gibson (August 13, 1975-) is a queer poet, whose work focuses on LGBTQ+, health, and social justice themes. They are a well known spoken word performer as…
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Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. Anyone else absurdly motivated by arbitrary reading challenges other people have set? I started subscribing to Book of the Month when I bought a 6 month subscription for my friend for Christmas. It’s now her annual gift. We don’t coordinate our choices–sometimes we choose the…
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On Saturday night, we drove up past Berkeley and Oakland and into the Orinda hills for the California Shakespeare festival’s (Cal Shakes) production of Lear. After parking in the gravel lot, we wound our way up the lighted path, through picnic benches (lots of people come early to enjoy a meal before the show), café…
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Reading through the Oakland Public Library’s Poetry collection. Taking a break from the 20th century, let’s spring ahead to something published this year. Rae Armantrout (1947-) is a Pulitzer winning poet (2010 for Versed). She has published something like 10+ collections, which seems amazingly prolific to me. She was born and did her undergrad and…
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Reading through the Oakland Public Library main branch’s poetry collection, book by book. The way poetry is organized in a library is quite different from fiction. Fiction is often just organized by author’s last name. Some libraries separate (either physically with shelving or using a sticker or some other indicator) different genres, but most of…
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Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This week’s prompt was books with geographical terms in the title, and while I was looking through my read books (thank you, Story Graph), I noticed a trend. All of the geographic terms I was encountering were through fantasy books. So I leaned into that…
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Reading through the Oakland Public Library main branch’s poetry collection, book by book. What is there to say about Man-Fate by William Everson? Honestly, the less said about it the better. But I read it–I want it to go back to the library. I’m sick of looking at it on my desk waiting to be…
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There’s nothing better than walking down the street and seeing poetry on your way to the library.
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Join me as I read my way through the poetry section at the main branch of the Oakland Public Library! First of all, I can’t talk about this book without mentioning how fun this 70s sunset is on the cover–bold, interesting, and really quite simple. I think this library copy is probably a first edition.…
Allison Burris 