RICK BURSKY reads from his new book of poetry, I AM NO LONGER TROUBLED BY THE EXTRAVAGANCE, and MARTIN OTT reads from his new book of poetry UNDERDAYS

I Am No Longer Troubled by the Extravagance (BOA Editions / Underdays (Univ of Notre Dame Press)

Please join us this evening as two terrific poets share their latest collections.

I'm No Longer Troubled by the Extravagance by Rick Bursky is a collection of poems that assign new meanings to the people and things of the past. The book moves in three sections through a fantastic landscape that maps human fragility. The poems in the first section speak to matters of the heart--intimacy and loss--punctuated by lovers who leave. The second section is comprised of prose poems chronicling misadventures and conspiracies: Russian spies on Wilshire Boulevard, artichokes that mate for life, and secret photographs of God. Finally, the third section pans out from individual experience, hosting the collective in fable-like reflections. Together, the poems in Extravagance mark with fragile acceptance the surreal extravagance of being alive

Rick Bursky is the author of Death Obscura (Sarabande Books, 2010) and The Soup of Something Missing (Bear Star Press, 2004), winner of the Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize. He lives in Los Angeles where he works in advertising and teaches poetry in the UCLA Extension Writer's Program.

Underdays by Martin Ott is a dialogue of opposing forces: life/death, love/war, the personal/the political. Ott combines global concerns with personal ones, in conversation between poems or within them, to find meaning in his search for what drives us to love and hate each other. Within many of the poems, a second voice, expressed in italic, hints at an opposing force under the surface, or multiple voices in conversation with his older and younger selves his Underdays to chart a path forward. What results is a poetic heteroglossia expressing the richness of a complex world.

Martin Ott is the author of the poetry book Underdays, Sandeen Prize winner, University of Notre Dame Press, 2015. Martin served as an interrogator in the U.S. Army and moved to Los Angeles to attend the Masters of Professional Writing Program at USC. His previous full length poetry collections are Captive, De Novo Prize winner, C&R Press, and Poets' Guide to America and Yankee Broadcast Network, coauthored with John F. Buckley, Brooklyn Arts Press. His two books of fiction are the novel The Interrogator's Notebook (currently being pitched as a TV pilot) and his short story collection,Interrogations, Fomite Press, 2016. His blog for writers, Writeliving, has been read by more than 25,000 people in 100+ countries.