Publisher's Synopsis
Poetry. California Interest. 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 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 in a post/Occupy house reading that never ends. "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 "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 "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 "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"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"
