dan raphael in Conversation with Christopher Luna
Sunday, October 27 at 2:00 PM
Powell’s City of Books
1005 W Burnside St.
Portland, OR 97209

Manything, poet dan raphael’s 21st book, begins with a description of the Rapture from downtown Portland and ends talking about cosmological babies with a couple universes of experience and imagination in between. Raphael will be joined in conversation by Christopher Luna, author of Message From the Vessel in a Dream.

Preorder a signed edition of Manything

Event description from dan raphael’s Facebook event page:

Manything, dan raphael’s 21st book, is just out from Unlikely Books. He’ll read a couple then be joined by Christopher Luna, the poetic heart of Vancouver, WA in talking about Manything, exchanging poems, and other topics.

dan raphael’s new book got it’s title from the wide variety of visions, voices and vocabularies among the 65 poems For 4 decades dan’s been active in the northwest as poet, performer, editor and reading host. Most Wednesdays dan writes and records a political poem for the KBOO Evening News.

Larry Smith, editor of Caliban, wrote: “It is appropriate that Dan Raphael’s Manything has come out in the year of Walt Whitman’s 200th birthday. Raphael is one of the few poets since Whitman to have such a complete delight in the multiplicity of the world. His integration of the objects of man’s making with the wildness of nature is liberating. The poet’s body parts can function independently and often co-mingle freely with dirty streets, rain, bottles, squirrels, and the sun. Manything is a vision, one that moves us beyond our complacency, making us less sure that the world we navigate daily is what we think it is. Like Louis Aragon in Paysan de Paris, Raphael awakens us to the ecstatic possibility that we might fall right through the sidewalk.”

Christopher Luna served as the first Poet Laureate of Clark County, WA from 2013-2017. Luna has an MFA from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, and is the co-founder, with Toni Lumbrazo Luna, of Printed Matter Vancouver, a small press which also provides writing coaching, editing, and manuscript review for Northwest writers. He and Toni co-host the LGBTQ+ friendly, all ages and uncensored Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic, founded by Christopher in 2004. Luna’s books include Brutal Glints of Moonlight and The Flame Is Ours: The Letters of Stan Brakhage and Michael McClure 1961-1978. His first full-length collection of poetry, Message from the Vessel in a Dream, was published by Flowstone Press in 2018. A revised and expanded version of Ghost Town, USA, which features poems and observations of Vancouver, WA from a New Yorker’s perspective, is forthcoming from Uttered Chaos Press.