Poetry

Recommendation: Ms. Benis has the gifted ability to relay intensity through quiet, subtle language. I am impressed also by her direct, insightful statements which keep the poems tense and alive. I, as you, read a great deal of new poetry, and I am happy (and relieved) to read work that doesn’t just convey sincerity, but…

Recommended: Rodney Jack has mastered Dickinson’s imperative: he tells the truth and tells it slant. His poems are marked by a welcome, persuasive, Classical restraint. The poet’s sensibility, and the particulars of his autobiography, smoulder behind all his work, but his gifts for the telling detail, for a moving intimacy of tone, and for a…

Recommendation: David Blair’s poems come out of what Greil Marcus once called “the old weird America” (still very much with us, underneath the fog of coiffed media blondes and politics-as-spam). His citizens are at play in a long-running tragicomedy. I like how the poems imply that the slightest quirks of a person’s character govern the…

Recommendation: One of the things I admire about Tanya Larkin’s work is how perfectly accessible it is, while at the same time lush with invention, music, obliquity, and all the other thrills we’ve come to recognize as visionary writing. The occasion in her poems is often an exact place which has the odd property of…

Recommendation: I endorse with great enthusiasm the poems of Jaswinder Bolina. I firmly believe he is a poet whom we will be hearing about in the not-too-distant future. The foundations of his work are complex, and I will attempt to lay them out here. Clearly, one would deduce from reading these poems, here is someone…

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…

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….

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…

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…