Month: September 2015

Rich in Word Love: A Conversation with Colette Inez

By Doug Carlson

Doug Carlson: Halfway into “Stamp Fever,” the reader suddenly realizes that things aren’t what they seem; that is, a different level of reality has taken over. As the boy’s world becomes more magical, his need is more apparent and our …

Doug Carlson

Doug Carlson joined the Review staff in January 2007 and works primarily in manuscript evaluation and nonfiction editing. Carlson’s essays on natural and cultural history have appeared frequently in magazines and journals as well as in several anthologies, including A Place Apart (W. W. Norton) and The Sacred Place (University of Utah Press). His work has been collected in two books: At the Edge (White Pine Press) and When We Say We’re Home (University of Utah Press). His most recent book, Roger Tory Peterson: A Biography, was published by the University of Texas Press in 2007. Before coming to the Review, Carlson was visiting writer-in-residence at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota. He is a former chair of the UGA Press Faculty Editorial Board and has served in editorial or advisory capacities for Ascent magazine, White Pine Press, and New Rivers Press.

on The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar by Helen Vendler

By Robert Schnall
From the Fall 2015 Issue

The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar brings together twenty-seven essays, reviews, and occasional lectures, written over the past twenty years by the renowned poetry scholar Helen Vendler, the best known “close reader” of lyric poetry today. Almost all of …

Robert Schnall lives in Cleveland, Ohio, and has been reviewing poetry books for many years. His work has appeared in Boston Review, Harvard Review, and the Missouri Review.

on Leaving Orbit: Notes from the Last Days of American Spaceflight by Margaret Lazarus Dean

By Justin Wadland
From the Fall 2015 Issue

What does the end of the space shuttle program mean for America? Leaving Orbit: Notes from the Last Days of American Spaceflight sets its coordinates by this question, and in an attempt to answer it, Margaret Lazarus Dean journeyed to …

Justin Wadland is the author of Trying Home: The Rise and Fall of an Anarchist Utopia on Puget Sound (Oregon State University Press, 2014), which won the 2015 Washington State Book Award in the History/General Nonfiction category. His essays and reviews have appeared in the Believer, the Normal School, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Rain Taxi, among other publications. He works as a librarian and lives with his family in Tacoma, Washington.

I Get to Float Invisible

By Marianne Boruch
From the Fall 2015 Issue

Someone’s sister in Europe writing her

adultery poems late night, half bottle 

of wine pretty much required. 

 

And they’re good, they really are— 

 

The things one hears in an elevator. 

Perfect strangers. I’ve always loved 

the perfect part,

…

Marianne Boruch

Marianne Boruch’s ten poetry collections include the recent title The Anti-Grief (Copper Canyon Press, 2019). She was a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Australia last year at the University of Canberra’s International Poetry Studies Institute, observing the astonishing wildlife to write a book-length sequence, a neo-ancient/medieval bestiary, which is forthcoming from Copper Canyon. The poems in this issue are a part of that collection.

The New Day

By Katharine Coles
From the Fall 2015 Issue

Enters in the heroic mode, feathered

And helmeted, muscle-bound

 

For glory, smelling of scorch. Raise

That sword a little higher

 

If you can lift it and buckle your straps

Tight. Insert fanfare. Nobody still

 

Gets to

…

Katharine Coles wrote her fifth poetry collection, The Earth Is Not Flat (Red Hen Press, 2013), under the auspices of the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. Ten poems from the book, translated into German by Klaus Martens, appeared in the Summer 2014 issue of Matrix, and her work is currently being translated into Spanish and Italian. Her sixth book, Flight, is due out from Red Hen in 2016. A professor at the University of Utah, Coles has served as Utah poet laureate (2006–2012) and as the inaugural director of the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute (2009–2010).

Sk8r

By Siân Griffiths
From the Fall 2015 Issue

June, 1985

If it had been night, the neighbors wouldn’t have stared at Ilsa in the back of the squad car. In darkness, the blue and red lights overhead might strobe her mother and Harold into sight, but Ilsa would …

Siân Griffiths directs the creative writing program at Weber State University. Her work has appeared in Fifth Wednesday Journal, Ninth Letter, the Rumpus, Quarterly West, and many other publications. Her first novel, Borrowed Horses (New Rivers Press, 2013), was a semi-finalist for the 2014 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award.

Mad Pieces

By Mairead Small Staid
From the Fall 2015 Issue

1.

In 1392, King Charles VI of France suffered the first of forty-four recorded psychotic episodes, turning on his soldiers and killing four before he was subdued. During subsequent bouts of insanity, he forgot he was king or thought he …

Mairead Small Staid is the 2017–18 George Bennett Fellow at Phillips Exeter Academy, where she is at work on her first book. Her poems and essays have appeared in AGNI, the Believer, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere.

Smoking with the Dead and Wounded

By Brian Turner
From the Fall 2015 Issue

For many years, I practiced the art of dying. During my enlistment as an active duty infantryman in the U.S. Army, I died more times than I can remember. I was blown up by a simulated hand grenade inside a …

Brian Turner is a writer and musician living in Orlando, Florida. He curates The Kiss series at Guernica, soon to be published as an anthology by W.W. Norton & Company (2018). He has published a memoir, My Life as a Foreign Country (W. W. Norton, 2015), two collections of poetry—Here, Bullet (2005) and Phantom Noise (2010), and co-edited The Strangest of Theatres (McSweeney’s/The Poetry Founda-tion, 2013). He is currently at work on a second memoir, “The Wild Delight of Wild Things,” and an album of music, “11 11 (Me, Smiling),” with his group, The Inter-planetary Acoustic Team. His late wife, the poet Ilyse Kusnetz, will have her second collection of poems, Angel Bones, published by Alice James Books in May 2019.