Poetry

Ego

Recommendation: 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…

Vandals

Recommendation: Jennifer Boyden’s poetry is haunting, empowered by a crisp but lyrical language. It’s quietly thoughtful and emotionally engaging. —Nance Van Winckel, author of four books of poetry and three short story collections. She teaches in the graduate creative writing programs of Vermont College and Eastern Washington University. They wrote it all down for me….

Yes But

Recommendation: In commenting about her own work, Teresa Leo cites Louise Gluck’s line, “All my life I have worshipped the wrong gods,” and goes on to say that her poems explore a similar revelation: what happens when one is drawn, for whatever reason, to the wrong partner. They chronicle the relationships that move from agency…

Life is too hard

Recommendation: Susan Browne has been my student for several years; I’ve watched her work harder than anyone I know to bring her poems to fruition. She’s funny, heartfelt, unabashedly emotional and narrative. I find her complete humanity so bracing. It was difficult to choose what to send, but I chose three poems that I think…

Oil on Panel

Recommendation: Ms. Maclay has a superb lyric gift, a remarkable imagistic clarity, and a constant sense of invention. Her recent prose poems—a departure for her—strike me as some of the most gracious and compelling of the genre. She is melding the concerns of her more fiercely lyric pieces with a more elongated music phrasing, and…

A Balance of Blues & Angels

Recommendation: Darrell Burton passed away tragically in December of 2002, just days after completing his poetry manuscript Weather Within. An accidental fire claimed his life in his Bloomington, Indiana apartment; he was 41. Before coming to Indiana University, Darrell lived a full life: navy shipman, chef, college scholarship basketball player, and successful fashion model with…

The End of Envy

Recommendation: 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…

Shaper

Recommendation: John Casteen is extremely talented, very dedicated, and a marvelous young writer. He always had a raw and edgy talent, an energy and kinetic spirit that were very impressive. Over the course of his time with us at UVA, he smoothed and solidified that talent and energy into finishing poems that were very impressive….

Aubade

Recommendation: Mark M. Martin is a recent graduate of the M.F.A. program at Florida International University. I am a big fan of his work—so much so that I solicited him for an anthology that my husband and I edited that includes such poets as Andrew Hudgins, Colette Inez, and Stephen Dunn. His poem has already…