Poets Ava Koohbor / Jessica Loos / Marina Lazzara, with music by Blind Van De Monk

Poets Ava Koohbor / Jessica Loos / Marina Lazzara, with music by Blind Van De Monk

 Ava Koohbor, Jessica Loos and Marina Lazzara read from their recently released poetry collections published by Lithic Press, Colorado. Music by Blind Van De Monk.AVA KOOHBOROF FLESH AND FREQUENCY:A POETICS OF SOUND MAKINGSound, when composed as texture,becomes a felt presence, a livingphenomenon with its own modesof change: birth, life, and death.Ava Koohbor is a native Farsi-speaker poet and visual/sound artist based in San Francisco. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications, and she is the author of Triangle Squared (Bootstrap Press) and Death Under Construction (Ugly Duckling Presse / Bird & Beckett Books). Her visual and sound-based works have been featured in performances and exhibitions throughout the Bay Area. She approaches art as a medium through which possibilities take form. JESSICA LOOSTAMBOURINETambourine is the new collection of poetry by San Francisco poet Jessica Loos. Loos is best known for her improvisational performances with music, including collaborations with Marco Eneidi, Cecil Taylor, Drop D, Mario Sacasa, and many others. She plays the tambourine and also makes collages. Loos grew up in New Jersey, went to University of Maine, Orono, and had a wild run in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where she became a member of The Living Theatre and a contributing writer for High Times magazine. She has an MA/MFA from New College of California. She also taught there, as well as at Academy of Art University. She lives in San Francisco where she organizes poetry and music events.  MARINA LAZZARATHE HOUSE BEGINS AN ALPHABETDuring the Covid19 pandemic lockdown, I wrote a poem inspired by a collage created by my husband, the artist, JLee. I then asked others for artwork. This is Volume One in a study of time & space as a cultural consciousness, private and public property, the home, the metropolis & natural world, the housed & the unhoused, one’s interior world in relationship to the external. In between wildfires and systemic breakdowns, suffering and hardship, people were kind to one another, people played music together distantly. People made bread again. The home/house became both protector and isolator.I struggled with what would happen when we “returned to normal”. I secretly wished the virus the only thing missing in our return as I watched my neighborhood change with each morning walk and our gradual return to “normal” display inequalities that occur during unrest and disaster. The “downtime” however often exposed how life could be if our time & energy weren’t wasted on profit and consumerism.This book tracks how I spent my days: working, gardening, walking, long drives to desolate natural environments, parenthood & domestic projects, and the appreciation of creative introspection to help untangle time.Ultimately, this book is a deep privacy: the necessary self in need of a collective.