When Doug Holder asked me for some background information for his interview program on Somerville Cable Access, “Poet to Poet,” I referred him to a Q&A I did with the online journal Niche, not realizing the link had been taken down. Among other questions, I discuss the source of “Italian Nobody,” a poem in Know […]
Last winter, Emily Jaeger asked if I’d write a blurb for her first chapbook, The Evolution of Parasites, published this year by Sibling Rivalry Press. I wrote a few sentences about the visceral power of Jaeger’s language and imagination, and the intriguing ways she reads the spectacle of one body preying on another. Such praise […]
If you’re reading this, you have Enzo Silon Surin to thank for creating my website and, with it, my blog. Surin is a writer, a teacher, and the publisher of Central Square Press, which, according to its mission statement, strives “to publish poetry that does not cater to the academic establishment but is part of […]
I’m writing for the first time about a book I haven’t finished yet. My friend Sharon Bryan recommended Rae Armantrout’s Versed, and I’m enjoying a precision as sharp and startling as the plunge of a needle in Armantrout’s spare, tight lines. Who expects “mass market” to follow a colon after the description “Ground cover of […]
After 18 months of retirement, I finally unpack the last box of books from my office at UMass Boston. I find books by colleagues; duplicate volumes of collected poems by Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson and Jane Kenyon I needed absolutely both at home and at work; books I bought at readings our program sponsored; and […]
Dan Chiasson’s review of Adrienne Rich’s Collected Poems 1950-2012 in the June 20 issue of The New Yorker quotes from the best-known poem in Rich’s first book, “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers.” He refers to it as an example of Rich’s early formalism “channeled cunningly” to describe a woman oppressed by domesticity who sublimates her genius and […]
It’s the 50th anniversary of Hanging Loose Press, which began in 1966 as Hanging Loose magazine, a journal that came unbound to your bookstore or mailbox in an envelope that doubled as a cover. This reflected budget constraints, but also the editors’ philosophy, which was, to quote from the HL website, “…that poetry is for […]
The title poem in Rebecca Morgan Frank’s The Spokes of Venus considers astronomer Percival Lowell, who mistook the reflection of his own veined eye in a telescope’s eyepiece for canals on the planet’s surface. This entanglement of subject with object, beholder with beheld, is at the heart of Frank’s new book. If “Everything before us/looks […]