Poetry

Standing off a bit, I watch one of them fly out of its form, so clenched up on its own that it does not understand the wash, the river carved into its underground. When it is here or there, it is always somewhere else, an optic hop away from the housecat moving slowly towards the…

If the dog were a cloud, he could run through blue pastures, and never catch his hair on a fence. He could leap at other clouds and they would not growl or bite. He could retrieve the sun, which would glow in his mouth, and light up all his teeth. And how pleased his mistress…

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: “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…