Poetry

When people smoked, and it hung over the table like magic or like wisps of the talk and the music between them, chicken bones, the best Chateaux, Coca-Cola in glass, Monk’s eyes cut left, Ornette laughing at something off-camera, safari suit and Savile Row bespoke, haberdashery circa ’72 and the black globe is damn near…

A. H. Gorson, 1872–1933 “The Pittsburgh School,” his colleagues called This way of painting the city—river and mill yard And wharf—massed shapes laid against the light That showered up, impasto, from their midst, The way forms dissolved or were cast into relief Or grew more massive in the general noon. Unlike other tonal painters, he…

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: 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…