Month: June 2016

on Bright Dead Things by Ada Limón

By Lindsay Tigue
From the Spring 2016 Issue

Ada Limón’s poetry recognizes the ways shifting landscapes throw order into chaos. In Bright Dead Things, her fourth collection, the mutable settings—from New York to Kentucky to California—serve to underscore the speaker’s turbulent feelings of loss. Limón’s speaker ties …

Lindsay Tigue won the Iowa Poetry Prize for her first book, System of Ghosts (University of Iowa Press, 2016). She writes poetry and prose and her work appears in Prairie Schooner, Indiana Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and elsewhere. Tigue, a Sewanee Writers’ Conference scholar and Vermont Studio Center fellow, holds an MFA from Iowa State University and is currently a PhD student in creative writing at the University of Georgia.

on The Great Medieval Yellows by Emily Wilson

By Adam Day
From the Spring 2016 Issue
…

Adam Day is the author of Model of a City in Civil War (Sarabande Books, 2015), and is the recipient of both a PSA Chapbook Fellowship for Badger, Apocrypha and a PEN Emerging Writers Award. His work has appeared in the Boston Review, Lana Turner, APR, AGNI, the Iowa Review, and elsewhere. He coordinates the Baltic Writing Residency in Sweden, Scotland, and Kentucky’s Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest.

on The Quarry and The Birth-mark by Susan Howe

By Paula Friedman
From the Spring 2016 Issue

Susan Howe’s The Quarry includes ten previously uncollected essays, beginning with the most recently written “Vagrancies in the Park,” a gracious tribute to her favorite twentieth-century poet, Wallace Stevens. Covering diverse topics, The Quarry also includes a discussion of Hope …

Paula Friedman is the author of the poetry chapbook Undreaming Landscapes (Aldrich Press, 2015). Her poems have been published in Prairie Schooner, the Michigan Quarterly Review, and Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, among others, and her book reviews have appeared in the New Criterion, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. She teaches at California College of the Arts in Oakland and San Francisco.

on Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems by Robin Coste Lewis

By Claire Schwartz
From the Spring 2016 Issue

There are a host of poetry collections that challenge that old adage—don’t judge a book by its cover: Claudia Rankine’s Citizen (2014), Bhanu Kapil’s Ban en Banlieue (2015), and Nate Marshall’s Wild Hundreds (2015) are but a few recent releases …

Claire Schwartz is the author of bound (Button Poetry, 2018). Her poetry has appeared in Apogee, Bennington Review, the Massachusetts Review, and Prairie Schooner, and her essays, reviews, and interviews in the Iowa Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. 

on Night at the Fiestas by Kirstin Valdez Quade

By Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes
From the Spring 2016 Issue

In a telling scene from the opening story of Kirstin Valdez Quade’s Night at the Fiestas, a young woman corrects her aunt for calling her by her given name. “Norma,” the character until this moment known as Nemecia, says, …

Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes’ first novel, The Sleeping World, will be published this year by Simon & Schuster (Touchstone). Her work has appeared in One Story, Pank, the Collagist, the Coffin Factory, NANO Fiction, Western Humanities Review, and elsewhere. She holds a BA from Brown University, an MFA from the University of Colorado–Boulder, and is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Georgia.

The Wild Unsayable: Magic, Mystery, and Ambiguity in Contemporary Poetry (on Mark Doty’s Deep Lane; Alberto Ríos’ A Small Story About the Sky; Jill Bialosky’s The Players; and Joanna Klink’s Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy)

By Kevin Clark
From the Spring 2016 Issue
…

Kevin Clark

Kevin Clark’s several books of poems include the forthcoming The Consecrations (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2021). His first collection, In the Evening of No Warning (New Issues Poetry and Prose, 2002), earned a grant from the Academy of American Poets, and his second, Self-Portrait with Expletives (2010), won the Pleiades Press prize. His poetry appears in the Southern Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, Gulf Coast, and Crazyhorse. A regular critic for The Georgia Review, he’s also published essays in the Southern Review, Papers on Language and Literature, and Contemporary Literary Criticism. He teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop. 

In the Land of Superstition

By Stephen Dunn
From the Spring 2016 Issue

It’s where black cats tend to live longer

than their allotted nines, and we avoid

cracks in the sidewalk to ward off whatever

might happen in the whatever places

of our minds. And on certain Fridays

when the thirteenth comes

…

Stephen Dunn is the author of numerous books of poetry and prose. His Degrees of Fidelity: Essays on Poetry and the Latitudes of the Personal,  is due out from Tiger Bark Press in October 2018, and a new collection of poems, Pagan Virtues, is scheduled to be published by W. W. Norton in 2019. He has been the recipient of many awards, including the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for Different Hours, and he has had fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations. Dunn lives in Frostburg, Maryland, with his wife, the writer Barbara Hurd.

Noonday and a Deep Idea of Yellow

By Pattiann Rogers
From the Spring 2016 Issue
…

Pattiann Rogers has published fourteen books of poetry, most recently Holy Heathen Rhapsody (Penguin, 2013), and a selection of her uncollected poems is forthcoming from Penguin/Random House in 2018. A gathering of 329 journals and magazines containing her poems was recently acquired by Texas Tech University and is housed in the Sowell Family Collection in Literature, Community, and the Natural World.

Love Songs for Lupus

From the Spring 2016 Issue

1. Idiopathic

 

These rooms never have windows. I’m alone

and waiting, still dressed in the incessant blue

 

of their gowns. Outside this room, my whole life

swallows hard. My husband paces the waiting

 

room, flinting his fists.

…