Nonfiction

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 which…

Drawing upon a keen intellect, historic and mythic images, and from her own Indian heritage, Minal makes poems that address essential mysteries. What compels me is how she is able to shape an image that offers revelation, and yet she retains what’s ineffable and unknowable. Like an Escher print, "dots" become "birds/with wing-length and body…

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 four…

Ms. Soppe’s work is nuanced and vivid, distinguished by a strong voice, a bold, experimental style, and wonderfully long sentences. In "The Pantyhose Man," the narrator is the collective spirit of the women who answer phones at a large Midwestern hotel. What begins as a comic account of how these women contend with obscene phone…

I have known James for about four years, and have watched his rapid maturation as a poet. His poems combine intelligence, whimsy, emotion, and a sure sense of rhythm. His lines, whether long or short, are always exactly the right length. They follow the natural movements of the poem at the same time that they…

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…

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…

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…