I’ve known Jeff since 1996 when, as my undergraduate student at Old Dominion University, he first attended one of several classes we would have together. The high level of his energy, his seriousness, his palpable joy in reading and shaping poetry was immediately apparent, and it was soon thereafter that he became more a collaborator…
I am delighted to nominate Brittani Sonnenberg, a senior at Harvard, and a member of my Creative Writing class last fall. Brit is a joy in every way: smart, unpretentious, perceptive, and adventurous. As a member of an improv comedy group, she is used to taking risks; you can see in her work, I think,…
One of the things I admire about Tanya Larkin’s work is how perfectly accessible it is, while at the same time lush with invention, music, obliquity, and all the other thrills we’ve come to recognize as visionary writing. The occasion in her poems is often an exact place which has the odd property of being…
Mr. Hennessy’s breathtaking poems interrogate the boundaries between the physical and the spiritual, the charged space between Eros and Psyche. Part incantation, part dream, part gesture, his poems help us to enter into our own bodies again, to feel as if for the first time the thrill of a lover’s caress or the sting of…
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 emotion,…
David Blair’s poems come out of what Greil Marcus once called "the old weird America" (still very much with us, underneath the fog of coiffed media blondes and politics-as-spam). His citizens are at play in a long-running tragicomedy. I like how the poems imply that the slightest quirks of a person’s character govern the insistent…
As a beginning writer, I had the good fortune to study with Albert J. Guerard, the greatest teacher of creative writing in the twentieth century. Guerard—novelist, teacher, and critic with equal intensity—taught at Harvard for twenty-three years, then at Stanford for another twenty-three, and was a mentor to many of the century’s most esteemed writers,…
I was once asked in an interview why cell phones don’t appear in my poems. This was followed up with a question about where I imagined the things that occur in my poems actually occur: "You know what I mean," said the interviewer, "things like deer and trees, birds and light . . ." I…
As Steiglitz needed to photograph O’Keeffe’s neck in 1921 that we might see her as he saw her, Jennifer Martenson shoots from behind in 2002 “to show the vantage rather than what was seen from it.” The poems, fictions, and hybrid “lulus” (see Field, Thalia) herein, largely by younger writers, work along parallel or intersecting…
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