Again Small Press Traffic introduces to Bay Area audiences an important talent, as Vancouver’s Melissa Wolsak gives her debut reading in San Francisco. Discover the secret of this quintessential poet’s poet, the woman about whom insiders have been whispering for years. Her work is an engaging blend of Language-based materiality and a lyric strain that’s fresh as breeze from the sea. Her first book, The Garcia Family Co-Mercy(Tsunami Editions), was one of the great masterpieces of the 1990s—startlingly original and marvelously rigorous. Now there are two new works, An Heuristic Prolusion,from Friends of Runcible Mountain, and the ongoing long poem "Pen Chants, or nth or, 12 spirit-like impermanences." At home in Canada she works as a metalsmith—like the Lord of the Rings!—and her poetry is equally worked, jewel-like, magical.

May 12, 2000