Poetry

Recommendation: 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…

Recommendation: 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…

Recommendation: “Ancestors” shows the quiet virtues for which he is becoming known as a poet. It has subtle imagery (the wasp, transposed into the ghostly shapes of the ancestors; the loaves of phantom bread); it has narrative momentum without being tediously anecdotal; most of all, it is alive in its various iambic rhythms, never coercively…

Recommendation: 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…

Recommendation: 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…

Recommendation: 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…

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…