Over a period of eight months in 2016-17, Kate Asche led a group of women poets on a transformational journey into the art of poetry collection-making. These poets (including Kate) collected their poems into chapbook/book manuscripts and shared these collections for extensive workshop feedback, which led to revision across poems through a developing “collection consciousness” as well as revision focused within individual poems. In many cases, new poems also grew out of the workshop feedback. On October 23, join this incredible group of writers at Sacramento Poetry Center to celebrate the challenges, discoveries and triumphs they experienced during this truly one-of-a-kind workshop.
KATE ASCHE, M.A., is a writer, teacher, editor and literary community builder working in Sacramento. her first poetry collection, the chapbook Our Day in the Labyrinth, debuted in fall 2015.
from “Vestigia (Thursday of Mysteries)”
What creature isn’t made from cruel vestiges?
Legless pelvises, sightless eyes, flightless wings—whose traces?
I recall my friend, her belly’s grapefruit-sized bundle of teeth and hair.
Some days, faith feels like a vanishing twin, the merest trace.
**
BETHANIE HUMPHREYS is a writer, editor, mixed media visual artist and curator. Her goal is to further the cross-pollination of the literary and visual arts.
From “Cephalopod”
I taste what I touch
but I swim headfirst
no bones to hinder
I slip in and out of tight spaces
**
JENNY JIANG spends any free time she can squeeze out of her days to ramble along the American River with the people she loves.
From “Rhubarb, Ars Poetica”
Although it tastes mostly like pasty goo inside lumpy, pasty flour,
I still carry rhubarb back to California, in baggies in my checked luggage.
Because we live in a made world: fields and furrows,
brocaded hallways. We sing the old songs because they sing to us.
**
HEATHER JUDY is a poet and artist. When pressed to write a 25 word bio, she realized nothing really matters. She sees words in color.
You, thirst, dusty dusk, dark
and dawn and dew. Black bird,
black bird, crow, bird. Land
my palm.
**
LISA LUDDEN is the author of the chapbook Palebound. She is grateful to be reading with these fantastic women poets this evening.
From “Tending”
In the shift from one to another,
a turn from the body to breath in relief.
We are not far from ourselves.
We’re just not sure how to get back.
**
MARIANNE M. PORTER earned an MFA in Creative Writing in 2014. She’s fine-tuning her collection of short stories and enriches her life with poetry.
From “Notes from Paula”
My mother-in-law loved the shoreline,
named all the birds, fished for king salmon
in open water beyond the bend of Monterey
Bay. I found her handwritten notes—
**
MARTHA STROMBERGER is a member of the Fall 2017 cohort of the UC Davis Creative Writing Master’s program.
And when the wet branches
of her lungs shuddered
and contracted in that first tender
alarm cry at His absence
**
BETH SUTER is a Pushcart Prize nominee with pieces forthcoming in Presence and Calyx. She lives in Davis with her husband and son.
From “Ode to the Sacramento Valley”
I learned to love yellow to live here
your goldfinches and star thistle
your ten kinds of deer grass
the color of my son’s fawn hair