More on: Poetry

Lance Larsen’s poetry inhabits a surreal backyard, blooming with zucchini, peonies, hooves and bones, sheet music by Chopin, and God the Father, loping through a vineyard. In 2012, Larsen was named the Utah Poet Laureate, a post he describes as “a kind of itinerant preacher of the word (lower case), or a Johnny Appleseed of…

Lisa Russ Spaar observed in a recent review in Image that the speakers in Stephen Cushman’s poems seem to do a lot of walking—beside creeks and oceans, up and down mountains, across continents. “Because Cushman’s travelers don’t miss much,” she writes, “the poems, accessible as they are, never shirk complexity…. They are so exceptionally well-constructed that…

Alice Friman’s poetry firmly inhabits the land of the living: subway stations, episodes of Judge Judy, the experience of living with depression. We often invoke Albert Goldbarth’s phrase about life’s “greasy doorknobs and salty tearducts” to indicate the sort of incarnational vision we want to publish in our pages. But we could just as easily…

“I am attracted to work which achieves its evocative shimmer, its sense of multiplicity, urgency, and dynamism, from a memorable music and a rich layering of correspondences,” said Bruce Bond in an author’s statement for the NEA Writer’s Corner. Scenes of a child sitting in church with his mother, a bare field drained of water,…

Robert Fink is a stayer. Having lived nearly his entire life in one state and served out a long, distinguished career at one university, he has developed the virtues that come with remaining in one place and devoting the whole of his attention to it. His poetry seems to approach the world from a stance…

William Wenthe is a patient poet. Maybe it’s because he’s also a fisherman. With practiced grace and skillful presentation, he casts his images onto the surface of the stream and lets them float, allowing them to hang before us for just the right amount of time before, with a flick of the wrist, he makes…

We wanted to lead off with our own handsomely crafted description of Larry Woiwode’s genius as a writer, but we’re going to step aside for a moment and quote what John Vernon once wrote in the New York Times:“Woiwode is an American original. He writes with a sense of both the quicksilver movement of language…

Amy Newman’s poetry probes the natural order, investigating its surfaces and rhythms as a way of finding a handle on the mysteries that loom over the created world. She finds intimations of paradise, the “First World,” everywhere, both in its presence and in its absence. She marvels at natural rituals, writing of birds, “They howl…

Through her poems, Margaret Mackinnon lets us enter the inner lives of writers and artists from other ages—figures like Mary Shelly, Grant Wood, Walt Whitman, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Her rich imagination creates vivid, concrete scenes in which to set her “characters,” as well as persuasive inner landscapes that make distant and stately figures recognizably and…

Dan Bellm’s poetry draws on the ancient Jewish tradition of Midrash: parallel commentary on sacred texts. His poems often take the stories of Genesis and Exodus and gently, carefully thread them into contemporary life—never as novelty or gimmick, but rather in a way that reveals their timelessness and applicability to the perennial human questions. His…