Poetry

Recommendation: 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…

Recommendation: I was taken with Christina’s poems when I first heard them, and when I read them my sense of her extraordinary talent was confirmed. She seems to me quite simply one of the most promising younger poets I have run across in years, and it is gratifying to see that she is quickly achieving…

Recommendation: It is my pleasure to nominate Nuar Alsadir. I have been a great admirer of her work for many years now. With echoes of Rumi and Hafiz, her poems are a delicate mix of the quotidian and the profound. In witty, vibrant, always surprising turns, she reveals to us the weight of each fleeting…

Recommendation: Angie Hogan’s poems are marked by a clear and sardonic intelligence, a wit that is reflected in the suppleness of line and crisp allure of her images. Although her subject matter is often difficult, she is never sentimental, eschewing the easy emotional tug for an unflinching poetic eye. “Paint me into the set of…

Recommendation: 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…

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…

Recommendation: 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…