Recommendation: Dobby Gibson’s poems are remarkable for their enactment of thought. Even at their most associational, there is always a syntax of argument at work which lends his sometimes serpentine sentences forceful momentum. Even when he’s flying by the seat of his pants, there’s a splendid sense of a presiding, living intelligence. —Dean Young, author…
Recommendation: 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,…
Recommendation: It is my pleasure to nominate Nuar Alsadir. I have been a great admirer of her work for many years now. With echoes of Rumi and Hafiz, her poems are a delicate mix of the quotidian and the profound. In witty, vibrant, always surprising turns, she reveals to us the weight of each fleeting…
Recommendation: The method of these poems is to juxtapose several elements, forming a kind of scaffolding, a structure to enable both narration and meditation. These long-lined, expansive poems proceed through this sort of triangulation, melding disparate elements so that the whole becomes larger than the sum of its parts. Waitresses talk in a diner while…
Recommendation: I am eager to nominate Michael Morse. I find a keen and seamless craftsmanship in Morse’s poems, which are beautifully understated and distinctly well made. They are quiet, but they have dark undertows, and I find some of them a little heartbreaking. There is real quality and depth in the poetry of this gifted…
Recommendation: Katherine Bell’s description of what her British post World War II woman finds buried in her backyard—her tiny garden—electrified me, not by what she found but by the delicacy of the description of what she found. A real writer. —Frank Conroy, director of the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, and author of…
Recommendation: “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…
Recommendation: Kathy Nilsson’s work is strangely stern—beautiful without being pleasant, compassionate but not at all sappy, sometimes funny but more often wry. It was my privilege to have her as a student in the Bennington M.F.A. program for the term that she was polishing and assembling her manuscript, and I had the experience, in poem…
Recommendation: Ms. Benis has the gifted ability to relay intensity through quiet, subtle language. I am impressed also by her direct, insightful statements which keep the poems tense and alive. I, as you, read a great deal of new poetry, and I am happy (and relieved) to read work that doesn’t just convey sincerity, but…
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