Iris Berry Knihy

In The Trouble with Palm Trees Iris Berry takes you on a tour of Los Angeles that’ll haunt you like one of the City’s famous unsolved murders. Her writing is gritty and scarred, but loaded with details, and an ironic, wry sense of humor. Whether she’s paying tribute to a deceased cat, or describing the suicidal tendencies of a gangster x-boyfriend, there is always a connecting thread—survivors’ wisdom and a sense of universal hope. ~ Pleasant Gehman

Writer Iris Berry has always been fascinated by the reality of modern-day Hollywood and its glittery history as Tinseltown, and in her new collection of poetry, All That Shines Under the Hollywood Sign, the two worlds collide. She marvels about the way jazz glides “its way/down translucent highways/at one in the morning” and “ephemeral evenings/draped across Hollywood” and rhapsodizes about such long-lost local landmarks as the Tropicana Motel and the Garden of Allah. Accompanied by evocative L.A.-centric illustrations by Scott Aicher. Berry’s portraits of vanishing and changing Southern California are often sentimental but infused with a rueful punk-rock perspective as she mulls over how “A catalog/of catastrophic events/shaped our lives. ~ Falling James, LA WEEKLY