“Powerful, personal, and purifying.” Heather Sellers, author of Field Notes from the Flood Zone

Based on iconic representations of Bible scenes, David Starkey’s poems in The Moon Shall Not Give Her Light attempt to recapture some of the strangeness of great Italian painters like Giotto, Fillipo Lippi, Bellini, Caravaggio and Gentileschi, while incorporating elements of contemporary life into work that is by turns witty, wild, sad, subversive and reverential. Twelve mystical and timeless conté crayon drawings by artist Rafael Perea de la Cabada deepen and argue with Starkey’s often skeptical interpretations of the Gospel. The result is a reading and rendering of the New Testament like no other.

Author Biography

David Starkey served as Santa Barbara’s 2009-2011 Poet Laureate. The Founding Director of the Creative Writing Program at Santa Barbara City College, he is the author of a number of books of poetry with small presses, including, most recently, You, Caravaggio and Cutting It Loose (2024 and 2022, both with Pine Row Press) and What Just Happened: 210 Haiku Against the Trump Presidency (Vine Leaves, Press, 2021). He has also written a popular textbook, Creative Writing: Four Genres in Brief (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 4th edition, 2023), and the novel Poor Ghost (Turner, 2024). Award-winning artist Rafael Perea de la Cabada was born in Mexico City and has lived in California since 1987. Perea received a degree from the National School of Painting, Sculpture and Printmaking in Mexico City and went on to earn his M.F.A. from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has exhibited at many galleries and museums in Southern California including the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Contemporary Arts Forum, Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art, The Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, and the Hunsaker-Schlesinger Gallery in Santa Monica. His work has also been shown, and is included in public and private collections, in Cuba, Croatia, Ireland, France, Germany, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States.

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