Ben Ehrenreich w/ Sesshu Foster, "Hold Still"

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This city does not let you grieve it properly, because it keeps rebuilding over the part you were grieving. A block you loved becomes a block you cannot find. Ehrenreich writes Los Angeles with that specific ache - the desert underneath the lawn, fire season as a fact of character rather than weather - and putting him across from Sesshu Foster is the real reason to come. Foster has been writing East LA for decades, from the inside, in poems that treat Boyle Heights as a civilisation rather than a neighbourhood being discovered. Two writers who love the same city from opposite ends of it, arguing gently in a Los Feliz back room on a Monday night. It is the kind of conversation this city almost never stages and that nobody bothers to record. The detail the regulars know: Skylight's Los Angeles shelf is to the left as you come in, and it is the best-curated collection of local writing in the county, out-of-print titles included. Arrive twenty minutes early and read the spines. Free, RSVP requested.