Happy New Year, Friends!
I am so pleased to share with you some lovely news–Paco Marquez is in town from NYC to celebrate the launch of his first chapbook collection, Portraits in G Minor (Folded Word Press, 2017)! Paco is an alumnus of my writing workshops who left Sacramento some years back to go to the poetry MFA at New York University. Paco’s work has always been stunning–full of energy, passion and a wonderful strangeness–and I am so very happy to see his work getting some much-deserved time in the spotlight.
I am honored, too, that Paco has asked me to read alongside him, and alongside Zia Torabi, at this coming Monday’s reading at SPC!
Full details of the reading are at sacramentopoetrycenter.com.
Ziaeddin Torabi is an Iranian-American poet. He was born in 1944 in Zanjan, Iran and immigrated to U.S.A. in 2011. He started composing and reciting poems in childhood and earned a B.A. in English language and literature from Isfahan University and an M.A. in linguistics from Tehran University. Torabi has published more than 30 books, including poetry, criticisim and translation. He has won many literary awards, including the 2010 Iran Annual book Prize for his poetry collection, Face To Face With Dream, that has been translated into English by Parisa Samady and was published by Ad Luman press of American River College in 2012.
Lost
It was just noon
when I woke up
the sun was standing
in the sky, as always
watching me.
Lost in my dreams
last night
there in the desert
far from home
my homeland.
Paco Márquez is author of the chapbook Portraits in G Minor (Folded Word Press, 2017). His work has appeared in Apogee, Ostrich Review, Live Mag!, Huizache, Occupoetry, and Late Peaches: Poems by Sacramento Poets. One of his poems went up on a public mural through Sacramento’s Del Paso Words & Walls Project. He was featured on Columbia University’s WKCR 89.9 FM’s “Studio A,” and in “I Know No Country,” a short film directed by Antonio Salume which won NYU’s Spring 2016 Sight & Sound Documentary Film Festival. Recipient of fellowships from New York University, The Center for Book Arts, and the Squaw Valley Writer’s Workshop, he holds and MFA in poetry from NYU, where he was poetry editor of Washington Square. Paco is a member of Los Escritores del Nuevo Sol and for several years he was a board member of the Sacramento Poetry Center. He lives in New York City with his partner of 12 years.
Kate Asche’s poetry is forthcoming in DIAGRAM and Canary and has appeared in Santa Clara Review, The Pinch, The Missouri Review (as an Audio Prize finalist) and in Colorado Review and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Our Day in the Labyrinth, debuted in 2015 from Finishing Line Press. Ms. Asche invests time in building literary community/ies. A graduate of the UC Davis Creative Writing program, she teaches workshops in Sacramento and is the faculty coordinator for the Sacramento Poetry Center Spring Conference. She co-edited the Sacramento Poetry Center’s journal, Tule Review, was associate editor for Under the Gum Tree and read for Memoir Journal. From 2005 to 2011, she coordinated The Tomales Bay Workshops under the direction of Pam Houston. She helped to establish the award-winning I Street Press at Sacramento Public Library and hosts a literary events blog at www.kateasche.com/ katesmiscellany.
by Kate Asche
(Originally published in The Pinch 37.2)
A STUDY OF PREPOSITIONS
Rain translates remoteness to hush
by disrupting the volume of the air.
Rain translates nearness to time
by disrupting volatile bodies—
aromas of wild cucumber and fennel,
coyote mint—
as it falls both louder and quieter
where I pass under an oracle oak.
I want to say after the drought,
but I stop myself.
What if after isn’t?