Recommendation: My recommending Mark Conway to the Emerging Writer’s issue is a bit of a farce, mostly because Mr. Conway was recommended to me first—by virtually everyone who has ever read his poetry. I first encountered Mr. Conway at the M.F.A. program at Bennington College, when rumor of his talent was whispered by an enthusiastic…
Recommendation: Kathryn Maris is an emerging poet whose truly original work deserves more notice. “The End of Envy” I praise for its ambition—imagining a psychological world where edifices are destroyed and only staircases remain, and where the speaker continues to climb from the surprising subject position of mother. Her poems gleam like gems, flashing brilliant…
Alice Hoffman is a prolific writer with a bent toward the magical and luminous, and it’s easy to imagine her at some fantastical loom, spinning tales of daily life turned to myth. In the real world, though, she works quietly and consistently out of an old Victorian house near Boston that she shares with her…
Recommendation: Rachel DeWoskin’s poems have astonishing dash and verve: they are fun to read, and they cut deep; they know when to stop and how to surprise. Her years in China give her material but she writes about it with a smart, revealing precision that is the opposite of mere touristic exoticism. I think she…
Recommendation: 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…
Further west there was the bee-buzz of Sirens impassioned like the jobless. Already gone were the thick shoes on the shore-rock as they changed to hooves. Gone as well all souls puffing behind the ship like an ash-cloud in a slow wind. Everything had come to be nude: the voices munching in me like a…
was next week with a garden in it, next winter with the glow of the unborn. My back up against the mountain, face to the snowy field,—glassy branches of the apple tree. If there was a mistake somewhere I didn’t know it, I only knew the deodar choked on sky,—despite the rumor of unaltered roots….
So all right, thought Peterson, he was speaking English, and, all right, so the map was from America. Well, naturally. And so, all right, the names of towns were spelled differently here and pronounced differently. But come on, hadn’t this country been open to tourism for at least ten years? "C-h-i-n-k-o," said Peterson, pronouncing the…
Sad song, thousand-mile voice, the crows throwing their existential shadows about. About what? Sad song little while. Little wheel. So the red petticoat flashes. The singer claps. O love of my life, our flesh is pulled away no matter. Foot slam. How we try. Foot slam. To hold each other in our mouths. So now…
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