Man, what an opening night to Aller Retour Paris!!  

Ping Pong, the Henry Miller Library’s literary magazine, threw a party…and A LOT of people came.

There was music (courtesy of Al Rose), wine (not red…yet not white…hmmm), and of course, poetry, courtesy of Jean noel Chazelle, J. Hope Stein, Shelley Marlow, and Ping Pong editor-in-chief Maria Garcia Teutsch.

In fact, we counted at least 100 folks sitting outside the fabled Shakespeare and Company under an unseasonably clear and dry sky with Notre Dame looming in the backdrop. Totally amazing!

Here are some photos. (For additional assistance in vicariously experiencing the magic, do purchase Ping Pong’s most recent edition here.)

There’s Maria to the left. She has published over 20 journals of poetry as editor-in-chief of the Homestead Review, published by Hartnell College in Salinas, and, of course, Ping-Pong. She teaches poetry and creative writing online. She also serves as president of the board of the Henry Miller Memorial Library.

Ilya Kaminsky on Maria’s Poetics:  “Maria Garcia Teutsch is a poet who looks for lyricism and sensual flavor in our daily moments, and makes poems that ride on the human nerve, like Frank O’Hara told us the poet must.”

You can currently purchase two of Maria’s collections through our online store:

* Pussy: Poems About Things You Think are Pornographic, a collection that uses the idea of the feminine “pussy” and the female self to sculpt carefully, wildly, delicately made poems that make being a woman and having a voice both a kind of resistance and kind of opening, a kind of violence, and a kind of seduction. Order it here. And…

* Chronicles of Violence, a short poem sequence, which you can procure here.

Then, to the right, we have J. Hope Stein.  She’s the author of the chapbooks Talking Doll (Dancing Girl Press, 2012), Mary (Hyacinth Girl Press) and Corner Office (H_NGM_N.)

Her full length manuscript The Inventor’s Last Breath, was a finalist for the Alice James Kinereth Gensler Award and her chapbook Light’s Golden Jubilee was a finalist for the Ahsahta Chapbook Contest.

You can find her work in Verse, Tarpaulin Sky,  Everyday Genius, Ping Pong (of course), Web del Sol, movingpoems.com and Poetry International.

And yet even more shots!