Kevin OpstedalBorn and raised in Venice, California, Kevin Opstedal is a poet whose line leaves three decades of roadcuts across the entire imaginary West. His twelve books and chapbooks include two full-length collections, Like Rain (Angry Dog Press, 199) and California Redemption Value (Uno Press, 2011), and his Blue Books Press, one of many of his "sub-radar" editorships, belongs in the same breath as the great California poetry houses (Auerhahn, Big Sky, Oyez...) that his own poems seem to conjure like airbrushed flames on a lemon carrying Ed Dorn, Joanne Kyger, Ted Berrigan, and some wide-eyed poetry neophyte to a latenite card game in Bolinas. "His poems," writes Lewis MacAdams, "are hard-nosed without being hard-hearted." As identity and ideas duke it out in the back-alley of academia, Opstedal surfs an oil slick off Malibu into the apocalypse of style. Read More Read Less