The Ladybug and the Universe (on Passing Through: The Later Poems, New and Selected by Stanley Kunitz; New and Selected Poems by Donald Justice; Odd Mercy by Gerald Stern; & Honorable Amendments by Michael S. Harper)

Judith Kitchen passed away on 6 November 2014, just days after completing work on the essay-review in Spring 2015 Georgia Review. The contributor’s note she supplied read as follows: “Judith Kitchen has three new forthcoming essays—in the Harvard Review, Great River Review, and River Teeth. Her most recent book, The Circus Train, was the lead publication in a new venture—Ovenbird Books, at ovenbirdbooks.org.” To that we respectfully add this brief overview of her writing and teaching career: Kitchen began as a poet, publishing the volume Perennials as the winner of the 1985 Anhinga Press Poetry Prize. She then shifted to prose writing of several sorts, with emphases on essays and reviews. Her four essay volumes are Only the Dance: Essays on Time and Memory (University of South Carolina Press, 1994); Distance and Direction (Graywolf Press, 2002); Half in Shade: Family, Photographs, and Fate (Coffee House Press, 2012); and The Circus Train (Ovenbird Books, 2013)—which appeared first, almost in its entirety, in the Summer 2013 issue of The Georgia Review. In 1998 Kitchen published a critical study, Writing the World: Understanding William Stafford (University of Oregon Press), and in 2002 a novel, The House on Eccles Road (Graywolf Press). She also conceived and edited three important collections of brief nonfiction pieces, all published by W. W. Norton: In Short (1996), In Brief (1999), and Short Takes (2005)—the first two coedited by Mary Paumier Jones. Kitchen also founded State Street Press in the early 1980s, bringing out over the next twenty years seventy-six poetry chapbooks, two pamphlets, five full-length poetry volumes, two collections of translations, and a poetry anthology—the State Street Reader. After teaching for many years at SUNY-Brockport—not all that far from her birthplace of Painted Post, NY—Judith retired and moved with her husband Stan Sanvel Rubin to Port Townsend, WA, from which they founded and co-directed for a decade the Rainier Writing Workshop low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma. The collection What Persists
Selected Essays on Poetry from The Georgia Review, 1988–2014 was published by the University of Georgia Press in 2015.

The Queen of Sheba

Flood

The Fourth of July

Keith Ratzlaff teaches poetry and literature at Central College in Pella, Iowa. His most recent books of poetry, Then, A Thousand Crows (2009) and Dubious Angels: Poems after Paul Klee (2005), are from Anhinga Press, as will be his next, Who’s Asking? His poems and reviews have appeared recently in the Cincinnati Review, Arts and Letters, Colorado Review, and the American Reader; his honors include the Theodore Roethke Award, two Pushcart Prizes, and inclusion in The Best American Poetry 2009. 

The Lake

Albert Goldbarth is the author of more than twenty-five books of poetry, most recently Selfish (2015), Everyday People (2012), and The Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poems, 1972–2007 (2007), all from Graywolf Press. He has twice won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry.

Homage to Szymon Laks

Bruce Bond’s twenty-eight books include Calling (Parlor Press, 2021); Behemoth (Criterion Books, 2021), winner of the New Criterion poetry prize; Patmos (University of Massachusetts Press, 2021), winner of the Juniper Prize; Scar (Etruscan Press, 2020); Plurality and the Poetics of Self (Palgrave, 2019); and Words Written Against the Walls of the City (Louisiana State University Press, 2019). His work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including seven editions of Best American Poetry.

Elegy for Miss Beagle

Marjorie Sandor’s forthcoming memoir, The Late Interiors: A Life Under Construction (Arcade/Skyhorse Publishing), will be her fourth book. Her linked story collection, Portrait of My Mother, Who Posed Nude in Wartime (Sarabande, 2003), followed A Night of Music (Ecco, 1989) and won the National Jewish Book Award in Fiction; eight of her stories have appeared in GR. Sandor’s volume of essays The Night Gardener: A Search for Home (Lyons Press, 1999) won the 2000 Oregon Book Award for Literary Nonfiction, and her work has appeared in the Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize anthologies, among others. Sandor directs the MFA program in creative writing at Oregon State University in Corvallis.

For the Second

Elbow Notes