Just a glance at the spines of Campbell McGrath’s five full-length collections of poetry—Capitalism, American Noise, Spring Comes to Chicago, Road Atlas, and Florida Poems—suggests both his favorite subject, American culture in all its exasperating, glorious abundance, and his favorite setting, the open road. McGrath’s first book, Capitalism, simultaneously hymned and lampooned 7-11 stores; in…
I am translating the world into mockingbird, into blue jay, into cat-bombing avian obbligato, because I want more noise, more bells, more senseless tintinnabulation, more crow, thunder, squawk, more bird song, more Beethoven, more philharmonic mash notes to the gods. I am translating the world into onyx, into Abyssinian, into pale-blue Visigoth…
"Ancestors" shows the quiet virtues for which he is becoming known as a poet. It has subtle imagery (the wasp, transposed into the ghostly shapes of the ancestors; the loaves of phantom bread); it has narrative momentum without being tediously anecdotal; most of all, it is alive in its various iambic rhythms, never coercively regular…
[postcard text] I am awfully fond of this garden. How pretty are those plants & flowers! There is a grotto in this garden I was afraid to enter as it is too dark there, but at last decided. It is full of passages, the water runs over the walls outside. With best wishes Yours…
Hawthornden International Writers’ Retreat There’s a poem I’m always trying to write. It always begins the same way. Oh, listen, listen— It is the urgency of the words that compels me. I know what the poem is about, it’s about the world and its shining. But what comes after these words is…
John Casteen is extremely talented, very dedicated, and a marvelous young writer. He always had a raw and edgy talent, an energy and kinetic spirit that were very impressive. Over the course of his time with us at UVA, he smoothed and solidified that talent and energy into finishing poems that were very impressive. He…
These cyan-colored snails emerge from the white Umbrian mist with murder on their minds—memories of slow rainy Saturdays—how the city of Firenze looked to Perugino on the day his second son was born—Lord Byron’s lost reflection buried under the pebbles in the springs of Fonti del Clitunno. I feel that snail itching its way across…
What did Sinclair Lewis say about sweet potatoes, or rather Upton Sinclair, or red potatoes? Crows. Crows all day. And the river holding on to the mist, sixty watts of sunshine at noon and the smell of cadmium under the bridge, coal yards and dumps, the boat launch south of the locks, fission in a…
In my opinion and in the opinions of many teachers, writers, and readers of contemporary poetry I am in touch with, Beth Woodcome, still in her mid-twenties, is one of the most talented, original, and hard-working poets in the country. —Franz Wright, author of many collections of poetry and translation, including most recently Walking to…
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