Poetry

  • Vandals

    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….

  • Yes But

    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…

  • Life is too hard

    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…

  • Oil on Panel

    Recommendation: Ms. Maclay has a superb lyric gift, a remarkable imagistic clarity, and a constant sense of invention. Her recent prose poems—a departure for her—strike me as some of the most gracious and compelling of the genre. She is melding the concerns of her more fiercely lyric pieces with a more elongated music phrasing, and…

  • Pain Thinks of Alcibiades

    Pain thinks of the sea the blackened fields the shore without daylight Pain thinks of the hour’s fires without witness the horses breaking & the sea breaking Pain thinks of the fields the tide rising in light’s black zone without body or breath Pain thinks of the sea without witness Pain thinks of Alcibiades

  • To the Sun

    whose strict interpretations are no help to me this morning— you can’t meet my need to go through the world unseeingly; I must attend your demonstrations. Turn the pepper-leaves to earrings, knight the sugar, turn light to salt, cups to miners’ lamps then back to whole seasons of rain in the subcontinent. I move in…

  • Flamenco

    Sad song, thousand-mile voice, the crows throwing their existential shadows about. About what? Sad song little while. Little wheel. So the red petticoat flashes. The singer claps. O love of my life, our flesh is pulled away no matter. Foot slam. How we try. Foot slam. To hold each other in our mouths. So now…