Poetry

Recommendation: Pireeni Sundaralingan depicts a straightforward urgency in everything she writes. She is from Sri Lanka, and her poetry captures elements of that country’s ethnic violence and cultural tensions. However, a credit to her and her poetry, she strives for a language that embraces a sober beauty through precision. Maybe the directness in her voice…

Recommendation: Her poetry to me seems quite brilliant. I’ve been reading her recently completed manuscript, Trip Meter, and consider it to be first-rate. How shall I put it—maybe the most forthright thing I can say is that, when it’s published, I’d be honored to write one of the blurbs for its backcover. My blurb would…

Recommendation: 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…

Recommendation: 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…

Recommendation: It is with genuinely boundless enthusiasm that I recommend Nicole Walker. As her dissertation director, I have had the opportunity to work closely with Walker in numerous venues over the past few years. She has ever proven to be a passionate and original reader of the canons of poetry, one whose energies extend beyond…

Recommendation: 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…

Recommendation: 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…

Recommended: 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…

Recommendation: 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…