In Story v. Novel, the story nearly always wins. In my opinion. I’ve written in both genres, and these days, when asked which I prefer, I say story. I like the precision of the language, the focus of the angle, the intensity placed on the moment. I like spending just that length of time, and…
I used to think a poem could become a flower, a bear, or a house for a ravaged spirit. I used to think I understood what it meant to write a poem, and understood the impetus to write, and even knew a little something of the immensity of the source of poetry. I was never…
I understand women the way junkies understand shooting up. Feel the rush, make the pain go away, and think about the next fix. I don’t know what to do when the glow wears off, when a real person floats to the surface of the dream. It’s the sixties, after all, and what might be pathology…
The vigor and accomplishment of contemporary American literature is nowhere more easily appreciated than in the journals and quarterlies that labor doggedly, and for the most part thanklessly, to display both the quantity and quality of the enterprise. The quantity and quality of those journals and quarterlies themselves is both staggering and delightful, and the…
Women think they know everything about love and they are wrong. Men think they know nothing about love and they are wrong, too. Books spoil you for love Love spoils you for food Food spoils Reading was the first thing worth leaving home for. I read the way you should never love or eat….
". . . whence a whole world emerges."—Cavafy A friend of mine finds out from her agent (her editor never calls) that her book, her fourth, has been dropped from her publisher’s catalogue. The work is too difficult. A writer I know is told, "How about putting in some dogs? People love it when…
Jennifer Boyden’s poetry is haunting, empowered by a crisp but lyrical language. It’s quietly thoughtful and emotionally engaging. —Nance Van Winckel, author of four books of poetry and three short story collections. She teaches in the graduate creative writing programs of Vermont College and Eastern Washington University.
Rodney Jack has mastered Dickinson’s imperative: he tells the truth and tells it slant. His poems are marked by a welcome, persuasive, Classical restraint. The poet’s sensibility, and the particulars of his autobiography, smoulder behind all his work, but his gifts for the telling detail, for a moving intimacy of tone, and for a syntax…
"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…
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