It's night in San Francisco but it's sunny in Oakland
Otis Pig What gathers in the pages of It's night in San Francisco but it's sunny in Oakland is a snapshot of a poetic moment. This book is a candid flash of the ever-evolving politics, relationships, and forms that make up this particular experience of poetry, right now, in Oakland. The anthology is 60 contemporary East Bay poets in a post/Occupy house reading that never ends. You can pre-order this book and pick it up opening night of the East Bay Poetry Summit.
To pick up your copy in person, use promo code <3oakland
Poets (in order of appearance):
Amy Berkowitz
Zoe Tuck
Joshua Clover
Andrew Kenower
Jackqueline Frost
Juliana Spahr
David Brazil
Taylor Brady
Zoe Addison
Ted Rees
Garin Hay
Cosmo Spinosa
Kate Robinson
Nicholas Komodore
Zach Houston
Marianne Morris
Elaine Kahn
Cheena Marie Lo
Carrie Hunter
Tom Comitta
Olive Blackburn
Bill Luoma
David Buuck
Rex Leonowicz
Lucy Tiven
Maya Weeks
Anne Lesley Selcer
Samantha Giles
Laura Woltag
Alli Warren
Alana Siegel
Steve Orth
Brandon Brown
Sara Larsen
Lara Durback
Lindsey Boldt
Otis Pig
Paul Ebenkamp
Michael Cross
Jasper Bernes
Sara Wintz
Mg Roberts
Andrea Abi-Karam
Zach Ozma
Oki Sogumi
Jennifer Williams
Justin Carder
Steffi Drewes
Tinker Greene
Turner Capehart Canty
Madison Davis
Brittany Billmeyer-Finn
Erika Staiti
Emji Spero
Tessa Micaela
Stephanie Young
Stephen Novotny
Nico Peck
Ivy Johnson
Zack Haber
Here's what we've heard about the book so far:
Rumor has it Oakland is a place, but I can say with some certainty it is also a time. It outwaits empire in alleys and corners, counting negation upon its fingers, refusing to show its face to what surveils. The walls speak—underpasses, too, and its literature says some things we were thinking, like, for Oakland, elsewhere is also temporal. The futureless future requires a multitude for laureate. This anthology is that multitude’s germ.
- Anne Boyer, author of My Common Heart
When visiting I sleep less in the East Bay, it’s the poets, wanting to be around them as much as possible. Their poems free me from the known. It’s sudden that realization of how old templates won’t work here, the magic of building the pipeline manifold into poetry. Have you ever paused to be grateful for the generations you get to witness? Me too, it’s all about this book. This is what family looks like.
- CAConrad, author of ECODEVIANCE
I left the Bay Area and then the revolution happened. So what do I know? It’s night in San Francisco but it’s sunny in Oakland is a weird orchestra experience or a way to peer into sustained struggles with language. Every few pages provide laser beam eyes into notebooks inside pockets of those at a house reading blurring into a protest. Reading this book, I feel a longing to be a part of the place where the writing first gets transmitted.
- Ariel Goldberg, author of Picture Cameras
What would it mean to take a snapshot of a large and various literary milieu after a moment of intense activism and struggle? It’s night in San Francisco but it’s sunny in Oakland includes a fair amount of post/Occupy poems, but also writings which channel the historical exigencies of Bay Area poetics—from SF Renaissance, through Beat, New Narrative, Lang Po, and less identifiable movements and genealogies. Many of these poems remind us that we are in a time after ‘the event’ in which life inevitably goes on, and more reflective modalities concerning the care for self and the sustainability of certain community dynamics and friendships set in. The heterogeneity of practices speaks less to a ‘movement’ or inclusive community than an ecology in which divergent practices can complement and support one another, gathering instead around the problem of how one might continue to struggle, plan, and study collectively—in anticipation of events to come.
- Thom Donovan, editor at Wild Horses of Fire
To open. To give. A circuit that shatters nothing, in a good way. Voided, elaborate. What kind of book is this, that—as Samuel Delany once said: “touches itself everywhere at once.” He was talking about a fold. A book folded to this degree. In this way, I write a note of support for an anthology that entangles and depletes other ideas of what the anthology might be. In a good way.
- Bhanu Kapil, The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics
Genres:
Poetry
240 Pages