Co-presented with COPPER CANYON PRESS. A very special night is at hand as two amazing poets, one new to Elliott Bay audiences, and the other, familiar but always, in the vital sense, new, give this reading of their work together. We'll go with reverse alphabetical order here, or let the visiting poet be introduced before our longtime friend and neighbor. Up from Arizona, Sherwin Bitsui is Diné of the Tódích'ii'nii (Bitter Water Clan), an extraordinary new poetic voice, the author of a fine first collection, Shapeshift, and now a compelling new book, Flood Song (Copper Canyon Press). This is major work. "Sherwin Bitsui sees violent beauty in the American landscape. There are junipers, black ants, axes, and cities dragging their bridges. I can hear Whitman's drums in these poems and I see Ginsberg's supermarkets. But above all else, there is an indigenous eccentricity, a 'cornfield at the bottom of a sandstone canyon,' that you will not find anywhere else." – Sherman Alexie. With Sherman Alexie, originally from the Spokane Reservation, but coming here now from just over the hill, there is a poetic authenticity and urgency in his poems and all other work approached by relatively few working today. Since his first book of poems and stories, The Business of Fancydancing was published 19 years ago, he has written 22 books of poems and prose, many a 'mix tape,' as he might say, and did say of his most recent book, War Dances (Grove Press). Last year also saw publication of Face (Hanging Loose). "[Sherman Alexie] writes of blood, mirth, anger, patriotism, pretension, sex, the fruitful collision of cultures, and calcified ideas about what it means to be a Native American, a writer, a man, a human being. Skirmishes with insects and animals illuminate our conflicts over nature, and musings about the toll of creativity inspire poems about F. Scott Fitzgerald and Richard Pryor. A bountiful, keen, and inspiriting collection." – Donna Seaman, Booklist. Bountiful, this evening, indeed.