Mark Strand, 1934–2014
And when you report back to your own daily world after experiencing the strangeness of a world sort of recombined and reordered in the depths of a poet’s soul, the world looks fresher somehow.To pay...
View ArticleThe Birth of Gastronomic Poetry
Both Mark and I had noticed at poetry readings that whenever food was mentioned in a poem—and that didn’t happen very often—blissful smiles would break out on the faces of people in the audience. Thus,...
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The Rumpus Interview with Erik Kennedy
Erik Kennedy and I have an interesting history. We both studied at Rutgers University, we were both writers in New Brunswick, and we both edited rival literary magazines. I edited Objet d’Art, an...
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Beauty Undercut by the Possibility of Terror: Afterland by Mai Der Vang
Afterland, the fractured, jagged-toothed debut of American poet Mai Der Vang, was selected by judge Carolyn Forché as the 2016 winner of the Walt Whitman Award, the Academy of American Poets’s...
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On Joy: Three Poetry Anthologies
The Australian singer-songwriter Sia’s recently released album, Everyday Is Christmas, seems to have a haphazard grammatical error in its title, but one which Atlantic Records didn’t see fit to...
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Both/And: Republic Café by David Biespiel
David Biespiel’s sixth and latest book of poems, Republic Café, should be within your reach as soon as you can make it happen. The book shouldn’t be placed in between others on your bookshelf or in...
View ArticleThe Joy of Play: Every Writer Has a Thousand Faces (10th Anniversary Ed.) by...
Compiled and refined in 2010 from a lecture he gave at the Rainer Writing Workshop, David Biespiel’s Every Writer Has a Thousand Faces is a guidebook for generating poetic material and living a...
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Gods Arrive Where We Pay Attention: A Conversation with Avni Vyas
Little God is Avni Vyas’s first poetry collection, but its vibe is decidedly mature, a gift fashioned from hard-won wisdom, what mystics have called “the dark night of the soul.” As Vyas explains in...
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