The (Pleasurable) Anxiety of (Aesthetic) Influence: Bill Berkson’s A Frank O’Hara Notebook
Long after O’Hara died, O’Hara was still influencing, shaping, editing, Berkson.
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Dean Rader
11 posts
Dean Rader’s debut collection of poems, Works & Days, won the 2010 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize and Landscape Portrait Figure Form (2014) was named by The Barnes & Noble Review as a Best Poetry Book of the year. He was won numerous awards for his writing, including the 2016 Common Good Books Prize, judged by Garrison Keillor, and the 2015 George Bogin Award from the Poetry Society of America, judged by Stephen Burt. He writes and reviews regularly for the San Francisco Chronicle, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and The Huffington Post. Two new collections of poetry appeared in 2017: A book of collaborative sonnets written with Simone Muench, entitled Suture (Black Lawrence Press), and Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry (Copper Canyon), about which, Publishers Weekly writes “few poets capture the contradictions of our national life with as much sensitivity or keenness.”
Rumpus Original Poetry: Three Poems by Dean Rader
Let’s admit it: we have all been vacillating between hindrance and drawback, / but that doesn’t mean our languor is our own.
The Rumpus Interview with Edward Hirsch
Dean Rader talks with Edward Hirsch about his new book Gabriel, the pain of losing a child, and the challenges of writing grief.
The Last Poem I Loved: Stanley Plumly’s “The Iron Lung”
I have often wondered if after getting these eight lines down, Plumly knew he had something magical in front of him. I have always suspected he did.
Crossing State Lines: An American Renga edited by Bob Homan and Carol Muske-Dukes
I first discovered Renga: A Chain of Poems (Brazillier, 1972) in a used bookstore in New York during my first year of graduate school. I was transfixed.
The Day I Got Burned I Wanted to Be Burned
If you like Hayes, if you like little books, if you like political poetry, or, if you are like me and like all three, you’ll find this book compelling.
The Hokum of Her Clothes
[O]ne of Laux’s strengths is her willingness to break through those poetic walls so many of us construct. She seems to want no distance between herself and her reader.
And Then Lapsed Ordinary
I found myself intrigued by all of the energy surrounding what people seem to be calling a renewed energy in Heaney’s work.
Hammer Is the Prayer of the Poor and the Dying
For [Christian] Wiman, form is the fire his feet are held to. It’s the syntactic embers that burn, the linguistic flames that flare. At no point does Wiman let the reader forget he is reading poetry.
A Dialogue at the Core of Her Being
Ai successfully blends personal autobiographical poems with her trademark dramatic monologues, making for a truly original text—a kind of personified hybridity—that is both haunting and humorous.
Between Good and Bad, Right and Wrong
James Longenbach’s fourth book of poems, The Iron Key, feels like it has itself arrived from a different era.