Jill McDonough’s poems are lyrical founts of energy and insight and humor and empathy. She’s a daring poet, formally sophisticated yet pushing the boundaries of form at every turn. In the four or five years I’ve known her poems, their subjects have dazzled me: a bumptious American girl teaching in Japan and loving the language,…
Recommendation: Kevin Wilson’s stories show us a world that is both real and full of illusion. One imagines the skies that sit over these towns are always a particularly vibrant shade of blue. The characters are people we almost know, and yet their lives are heightened, peculiar, both more dazzling and more tragic than our…
Angie Hogan’s poems are marked by a clear and sardonic intelligence, a wit that is reflected in the suppleness of line and crisp allure of her images. Although her subject matter is often difficult, she is never sentimental, eschewing the easy emotional tug for an unflinching poetic eye. "Paint me into the set of Parsifal"…
While the subject of Emily Moore’s poems may often seem to be frailty, her true subject is forcefulness. This young poet manages to glance in the direction of her great namesake, Marianne, the doyenne of armor-beaters, while keeping her eye fixed on the matter in hand and forging her own sturdy chain-mail. —Paul Muldoon, author…
Recommendation: 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…
Mark M. Martin is a recent graduate of the M.F.A. program at Florida International University. I am a big fan of his work—so much so that I solicited him for an anthology that my husband and I edited that includes such poets as Andrew Hudgins, Colette Inez, and Stephen Dunn. His poem has already been…
Jeff Parker has taken two fiction workshops with me at St. Petersburg Summer Literary Seminars in Russia. I have enjoyed and admired his humorous, absurdist stories, written with a light touch, easy-going sentences, yet with a great deal of discipline and compactness. In a playful attitude, he manages to develop drama and to render character…
Susan Browne has been my student for several years; I’ve watched her work harder than anyone I know to bring her poems to fruition. She’s funny, heartfelt, unabashedly emotional and narrative. I find her complete humanity so bracing. It was difficult to choose what to send, but I chose three poems that I think convey…
In commenting about her own work, Teresa Leo cites Louise Gluck’s line, "All my life I have worshipped the wrong gods," and goes on to say that her poems explore a similar revelation: what happens when one is drawn, for whatever reason, to the wrong partner. They chronicle the relationships that move from agency and…
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