Poetry

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: 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…

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…