Nathan Poole
Nathan Poole’s is a contemporary southern voice that feels at once strange and familiar. His prose has a generous lyricism, an unapologetic love of beauty, and an unhurried pacing that feel classically southern, but a style and freshness that are his own. His writing about the land (often his home state of South Carolina) inherits…
Read MoreDerrick Austin
Derrick Austin is a poet of the five senses. His work reveals a deep love for the look and feel of surfaces, for textures and smells, for visual geometries and qualities of light. His poems offer sustained attention to the senses. Through a slow, meditative accumulation of tactile images he presses towards surprising moments of…
Read MoreMario Chard
Mario Chard is a poet of borderlands. His poetic obsession is with Tierra del Fuego, the Patagonian island of fire and ice, a landscape he says reflects his love in in-between things and places. In his taut, compressed poems he embraces contradiction and contrast, even revels in it: between sleep and waking, dark and light,…
Read MoreLisa Ampleman
Lisa Ampleman is a modern troubadour. The great subject of her poems is love, and she explores love’s territory with persistence, imagination, and wit. Taking up the mantel of Dante and Petrarch—with an attitude of playful curiosity—she consciously inherits the tradition of courtly love poetry, both reveling in and troubling its favorite tropes. Her beautifully…
Read MoreKristin George Bagdanov
Gifted newcomer Kristin George Bagdanov is a border-crosser: in her poems, she moves her needle back and forth across the gap between mind and body, heaven and earth, human and nature, human and divine, then pulls the thread tight, drawing the panels together. Her poetic voice is patient, contemplative, unselfconsciously lyrical, never showy, with flashes…
Read MoreGraham Hillard
Graham Hillard is a reader of old books. Through a combination of research and imagination, his poems draw out what feels like the secret history and mythology behind the familiar versions—allowing us into the inner lives and tactile experiences of figures from Cotton Mather to prehistoric cave painters to Charon, ferryman of the ancient Greek…
Read MoreTania Runyan
Tania Runyan’s new poetry collection hinges on what seems, at first, like a surprising choice: it’s a sustained engagement with the epistles of Paul, that fiery preacher of the New Testament whose letters offer more than one stumbling block to modern believers. But the grumpy, abstractionist Paul of caricature is not the whole Paul. He…
Read MoreElinor Benedict
Of Elinor Benedict, Carolyne Wright writes: she “gives us a rich cornucopia of images in a celebration of connections with family and friends, all leavened with affectionate humor and lyrically understated grief.” Benedict appears, at first, to be a poet of the quiet life. Her poems are rooted in place (Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Bejing, California)…
Read MorePatty Seyburn
Patty Seyburn seems to have been born with a sense of language as a calling. She has a natural feel for the strange burden and privilege of being one of its guardians—that is, of being a poet. Words, in her book, bear a heavy legacy—one transmitted not simply through etymology, but through bare sound. Seyburn…
Read MoreMelissa Range
Melissa Range is the fortunate inheritor of Dickinson’s knack for questions, of a marrow-deep understanding of English’s Saxon roots, and of Hopkins’ slant rhyme (or “intermittent chimin’” as she calls it). Born and raised in East Tennessee, she is currently working on her PhD in English and creative writing at the University of Missouri, and…
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