Anna Akhmatova’s “Tale of the Black Ring” begins, in Jane Kenyon’s translation, “Presents were rare things/coming from my grandmother, a Tartar [sic];/and she was bitterly angry/when I was baptized.” This, and the Yalta of Chekhov’s “Lady with Lapdog,” comprised my experience of Crimea in literature until last week. The publication of Crimean Fig, the first […]
Bob Sykora is intrigued by love affairs gone bad. Some are individual, including his own devastating breakup––one that leaves him waiting, in the book’s first poem, for “the crushing infinite/nothing to hug me to death. I’m sorry/if I sound morose but I can’t seem/to put my life back in order.” Others are broken engagements with […]
Away Away is Mark Pawlak’s first full-length poetry collection since Reconnaissance, published in 2016 in conjunction with the fiftieth anniversary of Hanging Loose (you can find my review here). Much of what concerns the poet in his last book persists in this volume published by Arrowsmith Press. Pawlak remains a master of the transformative detail, […]
Thanks to DJ Snowhite for the music to the second poem in Petition, “Not Far”!
TRAMPOLINE AND BALANCE BEAM: ON ELTON GLASER’S GHOST VARIATIONS AND STEVEN CRAMER’S DEPARTURES FROM RILKE Elton Glaser and Steven Cramer bookend my life in poetry. I began reading Elton’s work––and he mine––when we were MFA students at U.C. Irvine fifty-plus years ago. Steven and I, along with Teresa Cader, have shared work for almost two […]
https://soundcloud.com/user-771488165/a-visit-to-the-smash-room?si=4962346eb78140bfb8f31d9604b90205&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing
Take the saga of Utah’s Mormon settlement, add memories of growing up in the church, mix in the voice of a monster rumored to live in an ecologically damaged salt lake, and posit an extraterrestrial witness to all of the above: this is the geography of Natalie Padilla Young’s first book of poems, All of […]
Here’s the title poem of my latest book set to music. Thank you, DJ Snowhite, for Petition Refrain!
“Emily gave a curt nod. ‘Then it seems to me we have a real mystery on our hands.’” So ends the seventh chapter of Because I Could Not Stop For Death, an Emily Dickinson Mystery by USA Today bestselling novelist Amanda Flower (there’s one more, I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died). Flower has […]