Poetry

Recommendation: Fresh from the undergraduate program at Chapel Hill, Julie Funderburk was in my first class of M.F.A. poetry students in the fall of 1992. Since then we have been colleagues and fellow poets, and I have been witness to more than ten years of development in her poetry and poetics. Essentially Julie is a…

Recommendation: While the subject of Emily Moore’s poems may often seem to be frailty, her true subject is forcefulness. This young poet manages to glance in the direction of her great namesake, Marianne, the doyenne of armor-beaters, while keeping her eye fixed on the matter in hand and forging her own sturdy chain-mail. —Paul Muldoon,…

Recommendation: Dobby Gibson’s poems are remarkable for their enactment of thought. Even at their most associational, there is always a syntax of argument at work which lends his sometimes serpentine sentences forceful momentum. Even when he’s flying by the seat of his pants, there’s a splendid sense of a presiding, living intelligence. —Dean Young, author…

Recommendation: I am eager to nominate Michael Morse. I find a keen and seamless craftsmanship in Morse’s poems, which are beautifully understated and distinctly well made. They are quiet, but they have dark undertows, and I find some of them a little heartbreaking. There is real quality and depth in the poetry of this gifted…

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…

after Ou-yang Hsiu In my kiosk for one, I, for one, water- colored on the grounds for concern. And everywhere I ever lived pined on a cinderblock in pencil. The rubbing may give you ideas. The princess never felt it more, the underlying in pursuit, lodged, a tiny drum in coverage and coverage of coverage….

Shame is my sister. She’ll have no niece. Agree in me a tenancy of junction and a process of elimination. One has promises and room for whom to keep herself. A pinkening vibe, as from exit light in other halls, mother-runs this cloister of disavowal, and in the sobbed-inside cells locked to mine I imagine…

Forgive us, we don’t exactly believe or disbelieve What the President tells us regarding the great issues Of peace, justice, and war—skeptical, but distracted By the swarm of things. The young Romanian poet in LA Said shyly: “In Romania, bums are only bums, but here In America the bum pushes a cart loaded with his…