An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by American Women edited by Andrea Hollander Budy Autumn House Press Pittsburgh, 2008 ISBN: 978-1932870268 Most of us who enjoy poetry—who enjoy reading—know about collections and thematic anthologies mainly from our seminars and other literature courses: most classes that are topical will include an anthology as a text, be it …
The Book of What Stays James Crews Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press 2011 The Book of What Stays, the winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, is a slim yet intellectually weighty volume that at once makes apparent how it would claim so serious a prize as it has: from the opening …
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 …
Two days ago I was at a local coffee house replenishing our supply of dark roast. I placed the order and handed my empty bag to the young woman behind the counter. She handed it back to me a few minutes later; as she tapped the bag, then folded and smoothed the worn paper, we …
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 …
It’s a bright sunny January day and I’m cold—freezing actually—even though the frost on the lawn melted hours ago, wafting up in ghostly drifts—even though I’m wearing several layers of clothes, like Heidi when she arrived at her grandfather’s house in the Alps. The poet in me paces, turns the heat to 68 (a rare …
If you walked into my kitchen right now you’d see the cartoon I snipped from a December 2006 New Yorker posted on a cupboard door beside one of Snoopy typing away on the roof of his doghouse, and a photograph of our now not-so-new new president signing something into law. In the New Yorker cartoon …
I’m on the train to my home city, traveling east rather unsteadily through the flooded marshlands. I’m reading a strange little book I found on my daughter’s shelf a few hours ago—Soulstorm, a collection of short stories by Clarice Lispector (1925-1977), translated from the Portuguese by Alexis Levitin, and first published in 1974. I’ve never …