Pacific Standard Time

Author: Kevin Opstedal  Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse (2016) This collection of new and selected poems by Santa Cruz-based poet Kevin Opstedal will be many people’s first introduction to this legendary Bay Area poet and small-press publisher. Full of West-Coast surf vernacular and the dark, hypnotic pull of waves breathing, Opstedal’s poems manage to float from Donne to the Romantics and Rimbaud, then wash up on the shores of the New York School in Bolinas. At 200+ pages, this book will give a thorough introduction/reintroduction to Opstedal’s enormous output of chapbooks and two full-length collections, as well as new poems from a lone, reclusive voice that might otherwise find itself lost to its own time. "No one deserves a comprehensive collection like this more than Kevin Opstedal, a tireless soldier in the fields of contemporary poetry, both as discoverer/editor and as prolific poet. An Olson without mountain, a maximus of the Pacific, Opstedal roams the beaches of Venice or San