I first encountered Ted Weesner, Jr. and his work when I heard him read at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and also at the Pen/New England Discovery awards. In both cases I was struck by his vivid characters and by the edgy, intimate, contemporary voice of his narrators. Later on the page, I found myself…
Recommendation: It is with genuinely boundless enthusiasm that I recommend Nicole Walker. As her dissertation director, I have had the opportunity to work closely with Walker in numerous venues over the past few years. She has ever proven to be a passionate and original reader of the canons of poetry, one whose energies extend beyond…
Fresh from the undergraduate program at Chapel Hill, Julie Funderburk was in my first class of M.F.A. poetry students in the fall of 1992. Since then we have been colleagues and fellow poets, and I have been witness to more than ten years of development in her poetry and poetics. Essentially Julie is a lyric…
In haunting ways, Alicia Conroy’s "Mud-Colored Beauties of the Plains" not only recalls Márquez’s "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" in its sense of a mythic past beset by modern society, but it steps back a page. Conroy’s story springs from the source of creation—the mud bed of "fluvial life from amid tree roots…
Recommendation: I first encountered Ted Weesner, Jr. and his work when I heard him read at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and also at the Pen/New England Discovery awards. In both cases I was struck by his vivid characters and by the edgy, intimate, contemporary voice of his narrators. Later on the page, I found…
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 the…
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"…
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