Our third-Thursdays poetry series continues at Mari’s Wine Bar with Bruce Williams as the featured poet. The open mic sign-ups begin at 7:30 PM for the first 10 poets, which begins at 8PM. Mr. Williams will read at 8:30PM. Mari’s is at 8222 Firestone Blvd, Downey, CA across from Porto’s. Wheelchair accessible, but 21 and over only. The Downey Arts Coalition sponsors these events, which are curated by Lorine Parks.
Bruce Williams grew up in Denver and received his PhD from Claremont Graduate University. For years he taught writing at Mount San Antonio College. He has two grown children, Drew, also a poet, and Casey Lynnette, a lawyer, like her mother, William’s late wife, Ellen. The poet still lives on a hill high above San Dimas, California with memories, a mountain-climbing roomer and two Jeeps. But he is spending much of his retirement in a cabin in Yucca Valley, near Joshua Tree Bruce has published several chapbooks: Clothes Poems (Pudding House), Stratification (Inevitable Press) and Everyone In My Support Group Feels Grateful After I Share. His first book length work, The Mohave Road and Other Journeys, has been published by Tebot Bach.
Bruce Williams’ “The Mojave Road and Other Journeys” is simply one of the most breathtaking and heartbreaking collections of poetry I’ve read in many years. These poems constitute a sequence of elegies and a folio of meditations upon illness, death and transcendence, and also upon the nature of late, redeeming love—David St. John
VARIATIONS
June 30
1
Dawn heats the sky,
bird song, dog barks a warning.
The hive in the wash
starts its buzz.
2
Her face
wrinkles into summer.
Her sex and eyes
stay young.
3
She asks,
“Who is this poem about?”
He looks at her
and lies
