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…
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 to…
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 of…
What I find unusual in Alissa Valles’s poems is a very strong expression of intellectual passion invested into the historical—or strictly personal—world. Her poetry is coming close to a kind of a "dynamic wisdom" maybe best exemplified in poems like "Two Gods." I think there’s an exceptional promise in her work, in her spiritual energy….
This special Emerging Writers issue features forty poets and ten fiction writers who have yet to publish a full-length book, nominated by authors who have. When we put out a call for submissions to the issue, our hope was that writers who had already established their literary careers would be inclined to help others get…
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