I can’t remember how many years ago I first “met” Russ Thorburn (ten maybe?) but it was after I saw his ad for manuscript editing in Poets & Writers. At that time I had a collection I had loosely titled “Eden Street” and, after some emails back and forth, I decided to send him a …
As soon as I came up with that title I realized I just can’t help myself—I am an ad man’s daughter after all; I come by the glib and the slick naturally. That said (and perhaps as a counter to the genetic link!), I also put my heart and soul into most of the works …
North Dakota, with its lack of elevation, vegetation, and rain along with the demands of the farming life, provide the fertile ground from which the luscious layers of desire and longing in our author and protagonist develop. Debra Marquart’s memoir, The Horizontal World: Growing up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere, for those who enjoy …
I confess: I grew up in big-box bookstores. In New Jersey in the 1990’s, monolithic Barnes & Nobles and Borders Books had already bought out most local bookworm haunts. When I had extra pocket money I would take a ride to the mall and lose myself in a veritable labyrinth of discount bestsellers. I loved …
First published in San Francisco Review of Books Berger is the author of three prize-winning books: The Mythologies of Danger (the 1997 Bluestem Award and the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association Award); Things That Burn, (Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry); and The Gift That Arrives Broken, (Autumn House Poetry Prize). Garrison Keillor recently read …
I must have been eight or ten when my mother’s friend Sally died, and Sally must have been in her thirties or at most early forties. After Sally died, my mother cut a poem out of “The Ladies’ Home Journal” and tacked it to the cabinet over our kitchen sink where she could see it …
I often wonder what ever happened to Francois Villon? I am an historian, as well as a writer of mostly poems and essays. I have a great love for history’s rascals, especially if they are poets. Especially if they’re late medieval poets, since I’m a bit of a medievalist. Francois Villon is best known for …
Burning of the Three Fires Jeanne Marie Beaumont BOA Editions 2010. 96 pp. $16.00 Jeanne Marie Beaumont’s previous collection (BOA 2004) was called Curious Conduct, and curious this poet and her poetry are, in several senses. First, Beaumont is alert to various and sometimes obscure aspects of the world: arcane information from Wikipedia, art, etymologies, …