We Talk Physics into the Night

Bullet in My Neck

Gerald Stern’s most recent books are a collection of poems, In Beauty Bright (W. W. Norton, 2012), and a book of essays, Stealing History (Trinity University, 2012). This Time: New and Selected Poems (1998) won the National Book Award, and his numerous other honors include the Ruth Lilly Prize and the Wallace Stevens Award. Stern taught for many years at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and he served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2005–2011.

Anthologizing—the Good, the Bad, and the Indifferent (on Word of Mouth: Poems Featured on NPR’s All Things Considered, edited by Catherine Bowman; Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry, edited by Billy Collins; Stand Up Poetry: An Expanded Anthology, edited by Charles Harper Webb; Hammer and Blaze: A Gathering of Contemporary American Poets, edited by Ellen Bryant Voigt and Heather McHugh; The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, third edition, edited by Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O’Clair; Good Poems, edited by Garrison Keillor; and Poems to Read: A New Favorite Poem Project Anthology, edited by Robert Pinsky and Maggie Dietz)

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.

New Maps of the Territories: On Mennonite Writing (on Sweeter Than All the World by Rudy Wiebe; The Breath You Take from the Lord by Patrick Friesen; Now You Care by Di Brandt; Searching for Intruders: A Novel in Stories by Stephen Raleigh Byler; and The Body and the Book: Writing from a Mennonite Life by Julia Kasdorf)

Jeff Gundy’s eighth book of poems, Without a Plea, was published in early 2019 by Bottom Dog Press. Recent poems and essays are in Cincinnati Review, River Teeth, Forklift, Ohio, Terrain, and Christian Century. He is at work on a series of lyric essays about the Illinois prairie with the working title “Wind Farm.”

 

on New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, 2003, edited by Shannon Ravenel

Jonathan Liebson’s fiction and reviews have appeared in Time Out New York, American Book Review, Chelsea, and Harvard Review, among others. He teaches at both NYU and The New School, and his writing and photographs can be found at www.jonathanliebson.com.

on Badlands by Doug Rennie

War and Poets (on Rendezvous with Death: American Poems of the Great War, edited by Mark W. Van Wienen and Poets of World War II, edited by Harvey Shapiro)

Nguyen Van Thieu Is Dead at 78

The Slow Insult

Lee Upton’s most recent book of poetry is Bottle the Bottles the Bottles the Bottles (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2015); her new collection of fiction is Vis-itations: Stories (LSU Press, 2017).