kate-braverman

[kate-braverman]

Kate Braverman was poet and experimental writer of a singular and ruthless breed. Author of four books of poetry, three short story collections and the novels: Lithium for Medea, Palm Latitudes, Wonders of the West, and The Incantation of Frida K. Her Graywolf Prize for Creative Non-Fiction award winning memoir, Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles: An Accidental Memoir was published in Feb. 2006. 

Kate’s works have been translated to Italian, Turkish, Latvian, Japanese, French and German. Kate's short stories and poems are widely anthologized. "Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta" appears in the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Kate's short-story "Mrs. Jordan's Summer Vacation" won Editor's Choice Raymond Carver Award. She received a Pushcart Prize for her short story, "Cocktail Hour. Other awards include the 2005 Mississippi Review Prize, a Christopher Isherwood Foundation Fellowship for lifetime recognition of achievement. Most Recently Kate has won the Margie J. Wilson Poetry Prize from Margie Review.

Kate has also received a Recognition Award from the California Legislature Assembly, and a San Francisco Public Library Honoree. Her certificate reads: "For your success as an influential novelist, short story writer, and poet, and for your literary achievements that have garnered great acclaim, numerous awards and a Pushcart Prize, thereby making California a better place to live."

RIP Kate Braverman 1949-2019.

Kate from “Writers Remembered” at the time remembering the life of Hunter S. Thompson. 

 (excerpts)...

In this city littered with poets and artists, their transmissions glittering through fog like post-millennial hieroglyphics, we are fluid, run in spasms and currents. We are a port town, built by the fever of raw fingers in rock, desperate for gold and the infrastructure that by accidental necessity arose. Whiskey and saloons, brothels, opium, fishermen, artisans, musicians, immigrants, priests, renegades and visionaries.

Trade route cities have the texture and scent of intrigue, contraband, delusion and revelation. It ’s an invisible configuration, a certain sting and suggestion of flame you sense loitering above the boulevards and alleys of Prague, Istanbul, and Bangkok.

In San Francisco, we are the American capital of a conceptual region. It’s a terrain of sensibility, drawing the restless, agitated, eccentric and explosively creative. We are the city of yes, and pirates and storytellers, from Jack London through Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs, they all moored here. Our legacy is an assemblage of writers who were not born in this geography and often did not stay, but rather passed through. The tide comes and goes as it always does. In San Francisco, we are ten thousand votives each with a dozen devotees like bouquets of long stemmed red roses and it’s always Valentine’s Day.

In San Francisco we pay homage to our fallen comrades, to the writers who bled their brains onto the page, and in these red glyphs carved the borders of our sensibility like cartographers using their neural networks for pens. Though we were just a port they passed, often briefly, the cargo they left us is indelible and untainted. We reflect and remember.

As America squanders its accidental empire, consigns its most fearless stylists to marketplace burial, and engineers a conspiracy of cultural selective amnesia, San Francisco is the city that remembers. As this nation stalls like a mast-ripped ship, passengers succumbing to manufactured official fictions of delusionary proportion, the drowned wash in and we greet them by name. See us on the wharf, with our candles lit, our torches? We are gypsy tribes holding votives in our ringed and tattooed fingers. We are individual lighthouses. We are the spasm of exhilarating yellow that glitters like a beacon of absolute and purified yes.

Yes, we remember the names of our dead. And we will never forget the eras they represent, the distinct decades of vivid and unlimited promise, the roads that could have been taken, but weren’t, even at the juncture where body bags and caskets filled fields like rows of April hyacinths.

In this city we don’t say amen. We say yes.

-          Kate Braverman

[kate-braverman]

[kate-braverman]

https://web.archive.org/web/20150928121537/http://katebraverman.com/angryshaman.pdf

[kate-braverman]

[kate-braverman]

[kate-braverman]

[kate-braverman]

Writing is like hunting. There are brutally cold afternoons with nothing in sight, only the wind and your breaking heart. Then the moment when you bag something big. The entire process is beyond intoxicating.

Kate Braverman (via lexiconia)

[kate-braverman]

A link to the original Braverman Archive which features links to reviews, poems, short stories, information for writers, and more about Kate Braverman’s work. 

[kate-braverman]

Review of Kate’s last collection of short stories published by City Lights, San Francisco, 2018.

[kate-braverman]

[kate-braverman]

1993

[kate-braverman]

Classified Ad

by Kate Ellen Braverman

I teach fourth grade batik and weave plant hangers with seashells bound in the yarns, pine cones and stones glassy from waves and age. I make ceramic vases and cups, bake breads, dance and read books. Last summer I hiked forty-seven miles alone in the High Sierras. I do not smoke or take drugs. I have lived four years in a cottage on a hill. My windows face the sky. I am responsible.

Painters have shared my bed, stockbrokers and psychologists. All are strangers, sleeping encased in sheet strange unreachable mounds fearful I will touch their dreams. They close doors while they piss and decline my shower. Breakfast finds them angry staring at a black well of coffee complaining my cats bit their toes, restless, wanting to change their underwear. Winding watches. Bound to other things.

I want to love a blue-eyed man and have blue-eyed babies, sleek and smooth as cats. And a yard perhaps, to grow spices and flowers. I am twenty-six I embroider, I sing. I am punctual and clean.

[kate-braverman]

RIP Kate Braverman

[kate-braverman]

RIP Kate Braverman

[kate-braverman]

RIP Kate Braverman

[kate-braverman]