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About the Book
This collection of new and selected poems by Santa Cruz-based poet Kevin Opstedal will be many people’s first introduction to this legendary Bay Area poet and small-press publisher. Full of West-Coast surf vernacular and the dark, hypnotic pull of waves breathing, Opstedal’s poems manage to float from Donne to the Romantics and Rimbaud, then wash up on the shores of the New York School in Bolinas.
At 200+ pages, this book will give a thorough introduction/reintroduction to Opstedal’s enormous output of chapbooks and two full-length collections, as well as new poems from a lone, reclusive voice that might otherwise find itself lost to its own time.
Author
Kevin Opstedal
Born and raised in Venice, California, Kevin Opstedal is a poet whose line leaves three decades of roadcuts across the entire imaginary West. His twelve books and chapbooks include two full-length collections, Like Rain (Angry Dog Press, 1999) and California Redemption Value (Uno Press, 2011), and his Blue Books Press, one of many of his “sub-radar” editorships, belongs in the same breath as the great California poetry houses (Auerhahn, Big Sky, Oyez…) that his own poems seem to conjure like airbrushed flames on a lemon carrying Ed Dorn, Joanne Kyger, Ted Berrigan, and some wide-eyed poetry neophyte to a latenite card game in Bolinas. “His poems,” writes Lewis MacAdams, “are hard-nosed without being hard-hearted.” As identity and ideas duke it out in the back-alley of academia, Opstedal surfs an oil slick off Malibu into the apocalypse of style.
Praise
In the News
Excerpt
The Tender Distortion of Parkinglots Near the Sea
Indispensable wet pavement
strumming the latitude & longitude
speaks to the inner noble savage
stars gravitate towards the corners of the sky
while breath continues to scratch the surface
you get used to it after a while
Trees fall inside tubes
held up against the light
morning somersaults from the vaulted
sky ceiling
wings stroke your left ventricle
The way pavement starts to ripple in the light
the sun creasing the late afternoon sky
might put a dent in your halo