poetry
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The Rumpus Interview with Gary Young
“We write because we can’t not write. We want to make music out of our breath; we want to be under the power of an art that toys with us and could destroy us, but which allows us to get…
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The Rising of the Ashes
What Jelloun proves throughout this book is that he has not let language(s) fail him or the people, places and historical moments he memorializes, making dates that are not headlines as important as front page news.
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Poetic Lives Online: Links by Brian Spears
Note: I’m adding this late, but it’s important. Our sincerest condolences go out to the friends and family and admirers of Lucille Clifton, who died yesterday at the age of 73. She was a tremendous voice for poetry and she…
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The Plath Cabinet
Many of the strongest poems in this poetical homage politicize Sylvia [Plath], showing her to be less a victim than a citizen of her time, whom history can misrepresent but not silence.
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Congratulations
Poet D. A. Powell, a subject of a Supersized Combos last April, has been announced the winner of the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award from Claremont Graduate University.
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Poetic Lives Online: Links by Brian Spears
Philip Pullman writes about Blake’s poetry, and argues that it can be appreciated separate from the illuminations. Thermos interviews Katy Lederer, who we reviewed nearly a year ago. Anindita Sengupta on Indian English Poetry. Inferno, the video game. It’s Dante…
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Crimson Colored Raunchiness and Terror
Taste of Cherry is a beautiful, carefully crafted, and sensual display of poetry; the verbal, pyrotechnical, unabashed bravery of the poems is their most significant quality.
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Stirring Coffee with a Feather
Margo Berdeshevsky’s work straddles the line between fiction and poetry. Her characters grieve, dream, punish themselves, and try to find harmony between who they are and who they might still be.
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Staying Alive as a Poet, Artist, Etc.
“Sometimes it seems as though poets, in particular, move in an endangered artistic world. Think Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Anne Sexton. And, last month, Rachel Wetzsteon, an accomplished poet who took her own life at age 42.” Jacket Copy last…
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Usher
B. H. Fairchild fuses mundane with spiritual in resolute ways, as “in the silent prayer for the grace of rain abundant,” a glorious line that would have been less so if the words “rain” and “abundant” were switched
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Poetic Lives Online: Links by Brian Spears
A tale of a poetry reading, or maybe the word “cock” is inherently funny. Annie Finch tells you everything you need to know about the sonnet. Who was in Best American Poetry 2009? The answer probably won’t surprise you. W.…
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“I tried to remember your scent as your own”
A collection like Ohio Violence is best consumed in small doses, so that its imaginative density, which is never ponderous, can be absorbed.