Waifs and Strays, Micah Ballard at City Lights Bookstore

Come join Micah Ballard for a reading and discussion of Waifs and Strays, published by City Lights Books.

The second full-length collection by Micah Ballard, Waifs and Strays recombines the allure, fixations, and diction of the Metaphysical poets with the alert and streetwise fracturing and instant amazements in contemporary San Francisco. Elegiac, elusive, evocative, the poems roam an urban landscape of bars, books, and chance encounters, where the ghosts of Congo Square haunt the avenues of the Fillmore. With the wasted elegance of Baudelaire, and the handmade warmth of Semina, Waifs and Strays is a rejection of all that is slick and disposable in 21st-century culture.

Praise for Waifs and Strays:

"Waifs and Strays is an invocation of poetic ancestry, so as to lead the reader through a gallery of visions imbued with elegance and charm. I enjoy deciphering the marvelous engravings, names, and epitaphs mapped out along its pages. There is a chimerical secrecy at work in these texts, an awareness of the poem as conduit. Mark this encrypted province you hold in your hands." –Guillermo Parra