Paradoxical Mourning in Edward Hirsch’s GABRIEL A POEM and STRANGER BY NIGHT
Paul Klee once said, “He has found his style, when he cannot do otherwise.” There are poets whose language takes on this kind of inevitability, something Rilke called the “unconcealedness of being,” which shimmers on, star-like and unbidden, shouldering the pain of loss.
The Social Virtues Series
Recent Posts
Review of VANISHING POINT: POEMS by William Trowbridge
From the Blakean embrace of the childhood imagination, to examining aging and death, to the profound undertone of uniting generations, William Trowbridge’s seventh collection, Vanishing Point, published by Red Hen Press in 2017, is a monumental testament to the circle of life in the twentieth century.
Two Poems
Take anything that stands beyond your ghostlike apparatus, / crenellated brain, the grasping neurons. / we might understand of understanding.
Review of OUR LANDS ARE NOT SO DIFFERENT & LONESOME GNOSIS
James Hoch reviews two new collections from Horsethief Books, Elizabeth Scanlon’s LONESOME GNOSIS, and Michael Bazzett’s OUR LANDS ARE NOT SO DIFFERENT
Afterword
Jeffrey Harrison is the author of Incomplete Knowledge (2006), a runner-up for the Poets’ Prize; Feeding the Fire (2001); and The Singing Underneath (1988), chosen by James Merrill for the National Poetry Series.
Why Write? #13: Edward Mullany
I walk a lot. This city is the city I will remember as the one I was living in when I first began to notice the physical effects of aging. And yet I am more or less fit.
Review of Kind One by Laird Hunt
Slavery in the South seems like an exhausted subject, but Laird Hunt’s Kind One feels fresh.
Cartwheel
We played croquet in the yard, cartwheeling when we felt it. When her mom would call us in for lunch, we’d save the game for later, or the next day, or the next one. Her mother smoked those minted cigarettes . . .
Congratulations to the Winners of the 2012 Neil Shepard Prizes!
We are very excited to congratulate the winners and finalists for our first ever Neil Shepard Prizes in Poetry and Fiction.
25th Anniversary Poetry Retrospective: Coming in June! . . .
Why Write? #12: Edward Mullany
It seems fitting to conclude this season's Why Write? series as deftly as Daryl Scroggins began it. And who is more deft than Edward Mullany? Why Write? An old woman tells the story of how, in her youth, she fell in love with a man who was not the man she would...
Why Write? #11: Suzanne Wise
Alice Fulton has said of Suzanne Wise's work that "it bristles with the struggle to define and comprehend the absurd component of evil and despair." Here in her "Why Write?" piece she turns toward the "monastic devotion" that it takes to write, to look Reality...