I find her work full of life—carefully observed, and expressed in language that is equally alive to gesture and nuance. Her poems surprise and satisfy, as when "used friends/look new in their unused clothes" or a wedding guest whispers a phrase the reader first takes as an epithet, then realizes it is meant as praise…
Kathy Nilsson’s work is strangely stern—beautiful without being pleasant, compassionate but not at all sappy, sometimes funny but more often wry. It was my privilege to have her as a student in the Bennington M.F.A. program for the term that she was polishing and assembling her manuscript, and I had the experience, in poem after…
I have been enthusiastic about Sharmila Voorakkara’s poetry since the first poem she wrote for my poetry writing class several years ago. From the beginning, her perspectives were strange and compelling, not merely willfully odd, and her language and imagery were original, both wry and brilliantly awry. I was pleased to have my own impressions…
Stephanie Pippin has my absolute highest recommendation. Because Stephanie’s work is so utterly original, it is difficult to know quite how to describe it. It’s exacting, like Dickinson’s, and characterized by a similar intelligence governed primarily by intuition, or that’s the sense it leaves me with—in the way that excellence, true excellence, always looks effortless….
Jay Leeming is the most brilliant of the younger poets that I have read lately. He is a high-stepper, and he risks a lot with each brief line. He is not one of those who puts down the name of his laundromat and everything that has happened to him since he was six years old….
When I first read the announcement for the Ploughshares Emerging Writers Issue I immediately thought of Ted Mathys, a poet whose talent reminds one of Hart Crane, and not just because Ted is also from Ohio and now lives in New York, but because of the preternatural facility for language they share as well as…
Rachel DeWoskin’s poems have astonishing dash and verve: they are fun to read, and they cut deep; they know when to stop and how to surprise. Her years in China give her material but she writes about it with a smart, revealing precision that is the opposite of mere touristic exoticism. I think she will…
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…
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