Angle of Reflection

Poetry. ANGLE OF REFLECTION features the work of ten award–winning Los Angeles poets with a remarkable 20–year history of working together. This luminous collection is both a sampler and a reservoir, capturing poems that serve as an entrée and retrospective as well as a showcase of current work. Perhaps the only umbrella term to categorize the poems here is lyric, though each poet's section offers an individual interpretation and definition. However, there is nothing fragmented about the way this anthology flows. Because of, and despite, the differences in these poets' singular voices, their poems carry on complex conversations across sections—correspondences that invite the reader to engage with the contrasts and similarities, themes and images. With an Introduction by esteemed poet David St. John, with whom some in the group worked weekly for many years, ANGLE OF REFLECTION is a celebration of community, collaboration, and the joy of poetic diversity.

Contributors include Marjorie Becker, Jeanette Clough, Dina Hardy, Paul Lieber, Sarah Maclay, Holaday Mason, Jim Natal, Jan Wesley, Brenda Yates, and Mariano Zaro.

This anthology covers tremendous territory nature, ecology, politics, identity, the philosophical relationship to place and landscape, and at the most impeccably timed moments, an appropriate whimsy and levity. A unique amalgamation of poets, this is a thoughtful intervention in an ongoing aesthetic heritage yet one that looks forward to new possibilities. --Chris Abani, author of Sanctificum and Hands Washing Water

The poems in Angle of Reflection are the work of ten Los Angeles poets at the height of their creative powers and skill. They are sensuous and savvy, and the interaction between inner and outer landscapes is consistently mesmerizing, from Marjorie Beckers shy exquisite sky of men to the taste of salt on the roof of Mariano Zaros mouth. The city of Los Angeles is beautifully and freshly seen here, in the swimming pools indigenous blondes (Brenda Yates), in the applause of surf (Paul Lieber). And then there is Dina Hardy gather[ing] gravity in [her] skirt, Jeanette Clough creat[ing] out of thin air what is not, Jim Natal disseminating like birds the seeds of the self, Jan Wesley mauling old lovers with [her] freedom. There are moments of epiphany, such as Holaday Mason s realization that every moment is a stranger, an exit wound, and Sarah Maclay s evocation of what comes after night that is not morning. Gathering as it does a generous sampling of the work of these wonderfully accomplished poets, Angle of Reflection is a cabinet of semiotic wonders, a treasury of the poetic image, rife with delight and discovery. Rest assured the lyric poem is alive and well and living in southern California. --Gail Wronsky, author of So Quick Bright Things

Angle of Reflection celebrates the remarkable poetry, longevity (20 years working together for some of them), and the depths of the bonds among the members of the group. This anthology is a tribute to the nurture such devotion to purpose provides. --David St. John, author of The Window and Prism