More on: Poetry

For the past seven years, the Image staff has had the pleasure and privilege of working with Jennifer Maier as a colleague—grateful for her behind the scenes help with the selection of the marvelous poetry that appears in our pages. But until recently, you had to be a subscriber to various literary journals to have…

Few poets write about the human body, in all its grace, frailty, and absurdity, with as much tenderness as Sydney Lea. In his poems, the body is the canvas on which our biographies are painted, the playing field of life’s battle. His voice is plainspoken, earthy, even casual, but as the poems develop (they’re often…

Linda Hogan can teach us a generous vision of nature. In her poems, novels, stories, and nonfiction, she shows a love of the created order that exists not at the expense of love of humanity, but as a fuller expression of that love. To be human, according to her vision, is to be situated on…

Like a Zen archer, poet Theodore Worozbyt is as skillful as he is serene. In language precise and apparently effortless, at once conversational and elegant, his poems offer meditative exercises that ebb and flow with an organic rhythm, by turns placid and stormy. Worozbyt is a master of mood. Line by line, stillness deepens, or…

Each poem of Gary Miranda’s is a world of motion, both animal and intellectual. They bound, twitch, shift, and bloom with affection toward time-bound humanity and the objects and ideas that entrance us. Effortless (or at least effortless-looking) and alive, full of wit, energy, and movement, they invite the reader to participate in a dance.…

One of the most valuable gifts a poet can give us is to make large things small. Most of us look to great ideas, classic religious and literary texts, and heroic figures from history and art for meaning and guidance, but so often these things get lost in the clouds. Enter the poet, who can…

In her new book of poems about her native Cajun Louisiana, Martha Serpas describes a landscape and a culture both made and destroyed by water, a sliver of endlessly fertile, endlessly eroding earth. Her swamp is a borderland, a threshold between land and sea, always a breath or two from being dissolved. From within that…

It’s sheer delight to watch the mind of Julianna Baggott at play. Her poetry and fiction are marked by a childlike, rapacious curiosity, vivid imagination, and unselfconscious wit—and her writing is also polished and full of style. She has the rare gift of being able to blend a pop sensibility with a respect for more…

The great gift of Richard Chess’s poetry is that it reminds us of the earthiness of language—its sounds and shapes, the way it bears the marks of history and geography. His work conveys a palpable sense of the landscape of Israel and Palestine and its beauties and horrors, both ancient and modern. In Chess’s cosmology,…

This is going to sound weird, but bear with us: we think that poet Madeline DeFrees is the reincarnation of Andrew Marvell. Marvell, whose poetic reputation lives in the shadow of John Donne and George Herbert, is best remembered for “To His Coy Mistress,” one of the best pick-up poems ever written, but he was…