Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center is pleased to present Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Samantha Tetangco Ocena and Moira Magneson, El Dorado County’s newest poet laureate
Date: Tuesday, Sep 9, 2025
Time: 7:00 pm PST
Where: Bookish Modesto, 811 W. Orangeburg Ave, in the Roseburg Square shopping center
Open mic following featured poets (3 min per poet); sign up at the event. Hosted by Gillian Wegener
Samantha Tetangco Ocena
Samantha Tetangco Ocena is a Filipino-American writer and teacher. Her poetry collection, Hope You Blend In: Studies In Color & Light (Broadstone Books, 2024), was a finalist for the 2023 National Poetry Series. A multi-genre writer, her poetry, short stories, and creative nonfiction have appeared in dozens of literary magazines, most notably, The Sun, Tri-Quarterly, Puerto del Sol, Zone 3, Gertrude, Foglifter, and Cimarron Review, among others. Sam has served as editor-in-chief for Blue Mesa Review, president of the AWP LGBTQ Writer's Caucus, and was co-director of Plume: A Writer's Companion, where she co-hosted Plume: A Writer's Podcast. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of New Mexico and is an Associate Teaching Professor at the University of California Merced.
ABOUT HOPE YOU BLEND IN: STUDIES IN COLOR & LIGHT
In this fierce debut, poet Samantha Tetangco wields “words like flint” to reveal the world we live in, from the apocalyptic world of California wildfires where “our backyards became / this hell / we have created” to the real world in which the queer brown body becomes “an open wound.” But these poems also remind us of the ordinary magic left to us: breathing in a lover’s scent, planting tulips, and even the beauty of weeds blossoming “so small & sweet / they always go unnamed.” Meticulously crafted and political in the best ways, this book brims with sharp beauty and reminds us what it is to be human.
--Lisa D. Chavez, author of In an Angry Season
Samantha Tetangco’s gaze is so sharp in this collection of poems, that a single shift in tense can pierce a hole in the wall of contemporary rhetoric. We who “taught the matches / how to strike” are given an aperture to view our own participation in history. Beyond holding witness, these poems provoke action. Are we—sharing a home, a country, a planet (on fire!)—actually in this together or are we just pretending? You will be known by what you choose: will you be a bearer or a borer of fruit?
--Benjamin Garcia, author of Thrown in the Throat
Moira Magneson
Over the years, Moira Magneson has worked as a river guide, artist's model, truck driver, television writer, editor, and community college writing instructor. A Northern California native, she lives in the Sierra foothills where she has spearheaded many art actions and initiatives, including El Dorado County's Poetry Out Loud Competition, Veterans' Voices, Barbaric Yawp, and Black Lives: An American Overture. In 2024, she was the resident poet for ForestSong, a community arts project exploring solastalgia, biophilia, and resilience in the face of wildfire devastation. And just recently, she was named El Dorado County’s Poet Laureate 25-27. Magneson is the author of A River Called Home: A River Fable, an illustrated novella (Toad Road Press, 2024). In the Eye of the Elephant is her first full-length collection of poems.
ABOUT IN THE EYE OF THE ELEPHANT
Moira Magneson’s In the Eye of the Elephant is an extraordinary collection of poems. I’ve rarely seen a book so exquisite in its centering of the natural world or in its honoring of the animal within us as well as those animals alongside us. Yet these poems are also dazzling and explosive in their reckonings with personal family wreckage, and so deeply moving, so deeply consoling in both their private and public grieving. Magneson writes, “I praise Earth as it is, its holy cup my heaven.” What a timely balm this book will be to its readers, and what a treasure of visionary human compassion they will find.
—David St. John, author of Prayer for My Daughter
I am drawn to Moira Magneson’s poems for the grime and gristle of their language—“elisions and plosives swept / piecemeal and stained // off the slaughterhouse floor”—for storytelling that stares pain in the face and delivers a hard-earned, unexpected beauty that is possible because of a clear-eyed placement in the natural world. This world is not romanticized but instead made wondrous through images that invite readers to consider their own station in the wild. In the Eye of the Elephant is rewarding on numerous levels; I’ll come back to it again and again.
—Albert Garcia, author of A Meal Like That
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