April 22 was the 25th anniversary of Jane Kenyon’s death, and the following night several poets and I were scheduled to read from Graywolf’s The Best Poems of Jane Kenyon at Porter Square Books in Cambridge. Of course, the event was cancelled; I spent time reading her poems to myself instead. With a broadside of […]
The uproar over the Poetry Foundation’s rote statement of support for nation-wide anti-racist protests recently forced the resignation of Henry Bienen from the board. Last month’s open letter to the Foundation by a roster of poets asks for “much more robust local programming, …large contributions to organizations such as Assata’s Daughters, Brave Space Alliance, and […]
According to “My History with Stars,” a mom spoon-fed her daughter “stars instead of peas;” by middle school, they’d all “ricochet” inside her, either “trying to become one/or forming a constellation.” Aly Pierce’s beautifully constructed first book ripples with energy, fashioning interplanetary systems through her mastery of the language of astrophysics, classical myth, and human […]
Here in lockdown, I spend a lot of time looking out my study window. We stock a bird feeder with seed and suet, so we get the vegetarian finches and omnivorous woodpeckers, as well as squirrels that leap from branches or forage the mossed and muddy ground below. I haven’t seen a New England spring […]
On January 14 George Kovach sent an email to his friends and colleagues announcing that he had been diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer and had chosen to receive palliative care. I was shaken with grief—and disbelief. Wasn’t he putting the latest issue of Consequence to bed? Hadn’t I hugged George at Arrowsmith Press’s December […]
Welcome back to my blog, which has been on hiatus for over a year, and now has a name: So I Gave You Quartz. It’s from the first line of “The Hardness Scale,” and seems to be a good description of a blog post—not polished like a diamond, but not soft and crumbly like talc […]
The title of Nancy Mitchell’s third collection of poems tantalizes me with a number of possible readings. An out-of-body experience could mark the dissociation of ecstasy or trauma, or “the bodiless begun” of death. From any of these states, a “shop” offers repair. How these meanings intersect, and how they define the writer’s journey through […]
The title of Charlotte Seley’s book comes from a sentence by Roland Barthes, “The world is in fact just that: an obligation to share. The world (the worldly) is my rival.” This can be read as a brag or an admission of defeat—who can compete with multitudes? Either way, it’s a claim for […]
Reading notices of Michelle Obama’s Becoming made me remember meeting the First Lady during a campaign fundraiser in Massachusetts the summer of 2012. Here’s an update of some notes I wrote immediately after the event. You can see in the photo that I look a little like a deer in the proverbial headlights. That’s how […]