She is seamstress, prisoner, chair, city, and "the girl" who takes" it all down..."
She is a master poet and performance artist who could burn the whole
goddam place to smoke and ashes, laughing in the conflagration, fertilizing
a profusion of fragrant flowers with the holy incandescence of her sensuous
syllables. She really lets it all hang out: to the very last dangling participle
from the dark side of the moon.
Review Pat Cohee,
Laguna Poets Series

Any discussion of her(Laurel ann Bogen) work would be incomplete without mentioning her reading style. To see Laurel Ann Bogen read is a real treat. Her poems become even more exotic when she performs them. The poem you may have read becomes a different poem as her reading amplifies it. "Havana" is one such poem. Strange and mysterious on the page, the city described becomes a character when she reads it. She transforms verbs and adjectives where she feels they will work. In "Havana, " she writes, "Havana, you lick into corners." It works. Review Robin Schyman of Tsunami.

Laurel Ann Bogen is the author of ten books of poetry and short fiction including:Washing a Language; Fission; and The Last Girl in the Land of the Butterflies.

From 1996 until 2002 she was literary curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where she coordinated the Writers in Focus poetry series and co-authored a grant sponsored by Poets and Writers, linking the museum’s education department with Beyond Baroque
Literary/Arts Center to create a writers-in-residence program.

Laurel Ann has been an instructor of poetry and performance for the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program since 1990.

Bogen has read/performed in venues as diverse as Cornell University, The Savannah College of Art and Design, The Knitting Factory (NYC), The DA Center for the Arts, The Los Angeles Metropolitan Transit Authority, The Museum of Contemporary Art and LACE.

She is a recipient of the Curtis Zahn Poetry Prize from the Pacificus Foundation and two awards from the Academy of American Poets.

Her work has appeared in over 100 literary magazines and anthologies including: The Misread City, California Poetry From The Gold Rush to the Present, The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, Stand-Up Poetry: An Expanded Anthology, The Maverick Poets, Poetry Loves Poetry, Grand Passion, Gargoyle, Rattapallax, Pearl, Solo, Bakunin, Yellow Silk, Mississippi Mud, Jacaranda Review, Los Angeles Times and Chiron Review.

That's how I came here
not by choice but by a calling
as surely as the devil herself
cloaked in the need to be seen
in filtered light
latticed with fault lines
and an underground whirlpool
as profligate as oil

from Washing a Language, "Hollywood Hills Noir"
by Laurel ann Bogen

Kiss Lips for
KISSS POEM

Click Shoe for
Love of Shoe Poem

Look for Laurel Ann Bogen's Book
"Washing a Language," Red Hen Press

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Laurel Ann Bogen
is a founding member
of the acclaimed poetry performance troupe,
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