The Best American Poetry

Sinatra sings "She's Funny That Way" & Ava sings "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man of Mine"

Next Line, Please: Questions and Echoes [by Virginia Valenzuela]

Have you ever written or read a poem that started and ended with a question, and found yourself so totally enthralled, so mystified, and included? Well, for this week's installment of Next Line, Please, our contributors were tasked with that very idea, with works by Keats, Shelley, and Yeats that end with a question, and works by Goethe, Rilke, Auden, and Shakespeare that begin with one, as inspiration. Shall we dive in?

Angela Ball refers to “Ode to a Nightingale” in the title and first line of her poem, “Viewless Wings”:

Are there still “wings of poesy”? Yes. They’ve been shelved,
like a beaver top hat collapsed when not in use, whose hatter
survives in a madhouse, where he deplores the lake
for its surly, copulating swans. Stylish poets reject
metaphorical levitation, as evoked by John Gillespie Magee, Jr.,
in his sonnet, “High Flight,” where he “slips the surly bonds of earth”
in a Spitfire MK1, aided by wings from Cuthbert Hicks,
author of “The Blind Man Flies” and source of the line,
“And touched the face of God.” What are these straw-man
“bonds of earth”? Why “surly”? Can plagiarism
fly?

I'm a sucker for things like poesy and mad hatters, and copulating swans, for sure! What a powerhouse.

Michael C. Rush dazzled many of us with the questions raised by “Eleutheromania” and with the magnificence of sound in the poem’s sixth stanza:

Who holier than the disbeliever?
Even the thirstiest visits the cistern of drool.

Choose your delusion? Choosing your delusion
is just one of the delusions that chooses you.

I smell burning books, millions of them, unseen, unread,
hijinks of accusing kachinas and kinkshamers drinking the soul-ution,

instantiating confusion, a quasi-tsunami of ludonarrative dissonance,
a knucklefruit parley between the chronic ironic and the cure of the curve

as was kisses will be with the lips of is.
What we take for granted is taking things for granted.

The shock of a duck
jerked up in the jaws of a dog.

Which is more powerful, narrative or verisimilitude?
Is power determined by the ability to deceive?

David Lehman is with Stephanie Cohen, who said her favorite lines of the week were “The shock of a duck / jerked up in the jaws of a dog.” For my part, I'm pretty enthused by "drinking the solution."

In “Requiem,” Pamela Joyce S. beautifully weaves echoes of Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”: “full of sorrow,” “half in love,” “full-throated ease,” “tender” night.

What are you thinking?
To think is to be
full of sorrow and
I am full of thought.

Only half in love,
you said half joking,
the quiet breath escaping
like a death rattle.

I called you soft names
with full-throated ease
In the forlorn landscape
of tomorrow’s separate dreams.

What thoughts will please you,
Love, on this last tender night?

So much yes! 

Diana Ferraro’s “Clockwork” begins and ends with timeless questions:

What time is it?

The sorry round face, two bones as hands
The mock banner of a forbidden ship
Poison, pirate, prowess, no lighthouse warns.

The past, a sacking bag laid on the bare land
Jewels and coals shifting and clanking
A peaceful cow with a bell hails the future.

Bright stamps on lost letters, used gloves, missed calls,
Stocked sunrays heaped within a tall fire
Written papers burn on the trail of autumn leaves.

Weightless witnesses stolen by the wind
Zephyr, sirocco or gale, so many skies!
Present melts in the sigh of a lived life.

Is it time?

As always, there are many more poems and interesting conversations on poesy to read up, so head on over to the American Scholar's page for the whole post! 

On Writing "On Not Using the Word Cunt . . ." [by Lisa Williams]

<<<
I enjoyed Jim Cummins' and Denise Duhamel's comments, as I've enjoyed their poetry over the years. It's a pleasure to be in their company. I want to approach this subject from a different angle.

What is erotic in poems? For some readers, graphic language and a bawdy directness, indicating sexual experience and lack of inhibition are appealing. If a woman writer is intrepid enough to place "cock" and "cunt" in her poems, you might think approvingly, no shrinking violet, this one! She is tough, she is brazen, she is "now." She doesn't cater to the old dream of beauty, and she's titillating besides. Maybe this is even a mandate: Pity the postmodern woman writer who doesn't put 'cunt' in her poems!

My poem "On Not Using the Word 'Cunt' in a Poem" emerged from considerations along these lines. A writer I know read a poem of mine in a magazine and wrote to me about it. She said that it was a little stately, that I might want to rough it up, sex it up a bit. The poem was not about the body, or sex, or love: it was about an idea, an idea which had to be (painfully) relinquished. It was an abstract and meditative poem, and—I'll admit it—a little stately. But the idea of "sexing it up" nagged at, then galvanized, me, especially since I am grumpy about the contemporary convention that women use graphic language to prove they are free from convention. In a torrent of language and attitudinizing, I wrote the poem, "On Not Using the Word 'Cunt' . . . almost as it appears. Though tonally close to anger in parts, the poem was a riot to compose: one of those experiences in which you, the writer, are intoxicated by the flood of language, mind sparking, tongue racing . . .

I wanted to explain that, in some cases, to rough it up/sex it up might be the equivalent of showing 't and a'—the same ole same ole, catering to new gender mandates, like "a burlesque romp/by someone who would rather keep her dress." Is a contemporary reader so distractable/skeptical that she/he needs to be flashed at every few lines? Must women writers continue to be subjected to the old polarities of prim and proper (old-fashioned) versus naughty and bawdy (postmodern)? Can't a woman writer be abstract and meditative by choice without losing authority? (Isn't that, in fact, a little more taboo these days?)

There is erotic engagement between writer and reader of another kind, as the body of words, so to speak, tempts and fascinates by drawing the reader into cerebration, excitements of the mind. I think of the language play and tonal revelations Emily Dickinson gives her readers that make each of us feel as if she speaks to us alone. Her poems are eternally charged. And what about the seductive possibilities of sound? A writer can seduce if she/he means to give pleasure, as Wallace Stevens can (to me), no matter how abstract he seems at times. We can submit as that music—whether discordant, harmonious, or composed of scales in between—guides the imagination to more "jocular procreations."

I think of that smarmy marvel of a tongue, the serpent in Paradise Lost, so flattering and seductive to Eve. If we are not so innocent, we can engage in conversations that are more than merely graphic or flattering. Consider the linguistic possibilities of a longer discourse between Eve and her tempter—not resulting in teeth ripping skin—yet; both speakers rising in words of excitement, wit, and suggestiveness; both voices rippling with inflection.

Lisa Williams

*The above is not a response to the blog before mine that I've just read, and which I think is remarkable.
>>>
Pictured  above: from "Beauty and the Beast" (Cocteau)

Auden on the Difference Between Authors and Critics

<<

There are people who are too intelligent to become authors, but they do not become critics.

>>

W. H. Auden, "Reading" (in The Dyer's Hand, 1962)

William Holden tells it like it is in the "Executive Suite" [by David Lehman]

"Is that what you want on your gravestone when you die -- that you raised the dividend to three dollars or four or even five or six or seven?"

William Holden in Executive Suite (1954) with Barbara Stanwyck & Louis Calhern (pictured, left,enjoying a smoke off camera) & with Fredric March, June Allyson always bright and merry, Walter Pidgeon, the world's greatest number two man, Paul Douglas, dour Dean Jagger, long-suffering Shelley Winters, Nina Foch, elegant as ever, and playing a better hand than in "An American in  Paris." 

With screenplay by uncle Ernest Lehman. -- DL

In Praise of William Holden on His Birthday [by David Lehman]

Born in O'Fallon, Illinois, on April 17, 1918, William Franklin Beedle was the most energetic kid in his class. He was popular among the boys because he was a good teammate in sports. The girls liked his good looks. His teenage years coincided with the Depression that brought his father, a chemist, to his knees. "We didn't talk about it much at home. We walked. My father was not big on talking. My father liked to walk. I liked walking with him." According to some accounts he came from a wealthy family whose fortunes brought them to Southern California in the 1930s but that's just talk.

The peripatetic young man played clarinet, sang in the school chorus,was a whiz at gymnastics (he could walk across the floor on his hands) and got his big break when Barbara Stanwyck took a liking to him on the set of Golden Boy in 1939. She saved his job. By then he had changed his name to William Holden, the first of many shrewd career decisions. He and Stanwyck became lifelong pals.

It has been said that William Holden is the greatest celebrity born on April 17, the closest competitor being Khrushchev. It would be nice to have a movie of Khrushchev with George C. Scott in the title role and with William Holden as the hard-drinking, poker-playing (fictionalized) American secretary of state who didn't go to Harvard but averts war because his poker instincts tell him that Khrushchev would back down unless you didn't give him a chance to back down. Firing first was always a mistake with a potato farmer. Call his bluff but at the same time make a secret concession and you all come out ahead, though history doesn't quite work like that. A year after the crisis the young president had his head blown off and a year after that Nikita was out of office.

Holden has many of the traits of an Aries with Libra rising whose moon is in Cancer and whose dominant Venus is abetted by a thrust of Plato. The emphatic Venus in his chart suffices to explain why an able lad with rugged good looks would succeed in his chosen profession, as you would, if you turned twenty-three the year Pearl Harbor was bombed and you were blessed with courage, honor, leadership qualities, and a high libido, unless life threw you a curve ball in the form of a lousy marriage or some other trace of trouble in Tahiti that will someday blow up like a huge aerial photograph to expose the places that were bombed in the war. 

Still, if you look like Bill Holden shirtless in Picnic or The Bridge on the River Kwai, you can't miss. You can be a Swedish industrialist who was neutral until he saw first-hand what monsters the Nazis were, or you can be Humphrey Bogart's high-living younger brother, or a journalist in a convertible in Asia, a corporate vice president who resists bottom-line pressures because he values quality, a TV network executive who's seen it all, the head of a band of hombres who rob trains and ride into Mexico just when cowboys are becoming a thing of the past. But the role that suited BIll Holden best was that of prisoner of war: in Stalag 17, captured by the Nazis; in The Bridge on the River Kwai, a captive of the Japanese in the jungles of Burma.

To understand why Bill Holden became a great movie star, emblem of masculinity, and hopeless alcoholic, you must understand that his brother, Robert, a fighter pilot, was killed in combat in World War II. Holden himself served in the army for three years, 1942-1945, and served valiantly. Yet he suffered in silence the guilt of the unworthy survivor.

What William Holden brought to the movies was a masculine ideal. He was a grown up, sometimes a wise ass but never a fool, who had what it takes to make it, whether "it" was an escape from or into danger. But he was versatile. He was a natural hero, but could as easily be found face down in a swimming pool, dead from the start like the narrator of Sunset Boulevard in 1950. In that movie Holden played Hollywood screenwriter Joe Gillis who meets a diva from the silent screen star era and becomes a kept man. Others have remarked that it seems as if his fate as a dead man who can't stop talking epitomizes the role of the writer in Hollywood movies.

Set in a German POW camp in a dreary December in World War II,Stalag 17 won him the Academy Award in 1953. Look at all the things he is in that all-male movie: a loner, a shrewd guy who knows the odds, a successful exponent of the free enterprise system, a scapegoat, the victim of a vicious beating, a detective, a skillful interrogator, and an expert planner. He turns the tables on the real traitor in the group and devises a means of escape that allows him, the outcast, to become a hero and save a doomed man from frostbite.

In Executive Suite he is the executive most likely to succeed because he is dashing, decisive, has a conscience and a vision, and is married to June Allyson who plays catch with their son. He has a natural ally in Walter Pidgeon, who will make a great executive vice president if given the chance. Barbara Stanwyck in a chic black cap, playing the sister of the corporate CEO was has suddenly dropped dead, unexpectedly throws in her lot with him, and he carries the day against Fredric March, an antagonist who sweats too much and whose chief ally, Louis Calhern, is unreliable. A pleasure to see them all at work, with elegant Nina Foch as the executive secretary. Also in the cast are Dean Jagger, Shelly Winters, and Paul Douglas.See photo of Holden, Stanwyck, and Calhern below: The cigarette smoke lingers in the air. "Is that what you want on your gravestone when you die -- that you raised the dividend to three dollars or four or even five or six or seven?" And at the end of the movie: "Who won?" "We did."

Holden plays not a cynic but a skeptic and a pessimist whose pessimism is validated in The Bridge on the River Kwai, David Lean's greatest movie in my opinion. Shears would much prefer to lie on a South Pacific beach with an army nurse drinking martinis. Anyone would. And he deserves it. He did his time in the jungle and escaped from a Japanese POW camp run by a sadist. To escape required tremendous luck. And here they were interrupting his lucky life, blackmailing him into returning there by parachute with the insufferable, hale-and-hearty Jack Hawkins, the Oxbridge-educated Brit who is able to speak seven languages competently. Also on the mission is a Canadian solider, a kid really, capable enough in knife combat but with a thing about killing. They have to bomb the bridge that the crazy English major Alec Guiness is helping the Japanese construct. I will not give away the explosive climax, but the last word in the picture, spoken by James Donald, is "Madness."

What Holden's character has done that makes himself vulnerable to blackmail by British intelligence is exactly what Don Draper does in the Korean War in Mad Men but again I'm not going to give that away here.

I have written elsewhere about The Counterfeit Traitor, as exciting a movie about espionage in Nazi Germany as has ever been made. In The Wild Bunch, Holden and pals Ernest Borgnine, Warren Oates, and Ben Johnson, ex-pal Robert Ryan, and old fogie pal Edmund O'Brien, preside o'er the slow-motion death of the west. Cars have made horses defunct, and machine guns can wipe out the whole lot of them plus innumerable Mexicans in uniforms led by a heartless slob with a vicious streak. The outlaws may be on the wrong side of the law, but they are on the right side of political history. The men know they will die. But they do not falter. After Holden finishes his business with the whore, he puts on his gun belt and his hat, walks outside, eyes the others, and says, "Let's go." Warren Oates replies: "Why not?" Holden's last word in the picture is "Bitch."

Holden was married to the beautiful Brenda Marshall. He served as Ronald Reagan's best man when the Gipper wed Nancy Davis in 1952. In Italy in 1966 he was charged with vehicular manslaughter and driving under the influence. This added another reason for drunken depression.

Holden was Joe Bonaparte in Golden Boy, George Gibbs in Our Town, Joe Gillis in Sunset Boulevard, Stefson in Stalag 17, Shears in The Bridge on the River Kwai, and Eric Erickson in The Counterfeit Traitor. It was downhill after his work as Max Schumacher in Sidney Lumet's Network brought him admiring notices in 1976.

Director Billy Wilder said that Holden was a good citizen, dedicated to the cause of endangered species in Africa.  "What he didn't realize was that he was himself an endangered species."

Died drunk in his Santa Monica home on November 16, 1981. In 1982 Barbara Stanwyck received a long overdue honorary Oscar. She said, "A few years ago I stood on this stage with William Holden as a presenter. I loved him very much, and I miss him. He always wished that I would get an Oscar. And so tonight, my golden boy, you got your wish." -- DL

Grace Cavalieri Reviews "Playlist"

Grace Cavalieri reviews Playlist by David Lehman. University of Pittsburgh Press. 64 pages.

<<<
Lehman, already at the forefront of our literary culture, writes a music retrospective inspired by his friend, the late great poet A.R. Ammons. In 1965, Ammons’ book Tape for the Turn of the Year premiered poems written on a cash-register tape. In these, he gave us permission “to say and du anything.” And so, Lehman does — chronicling jazz icons of the 40s 50s 60s — as well as film/TV stars. This book will break your heart for all that’s passed, and especially how tenderly Lehman revives it.

By identifying song and singer, Lehman traces this country’s cultural story and tells us what the past is worth, and why. And this is where you fall in love…the poet’s personal involvement…where he was the night of…what he was drinking…how he felt…not reminiscences, nothing so cheap as that, but actual shards piecing his own life together through music, day by calendar day.

What is the central issue of any book- length poem? With Ammons, it was claiming his right as poet. With Lehman, it’s a true devotion to the meaning and spirit of that great human endeavor, jazz — as well as classic pop culture. Lehman is knowledgeable about music’s traditional story, and he takes it out of the corner, away from music connoisseurs, to animate it for all readers. The passion and strength of the poet shape stories of singers and musicians, at times making song out of words. The writing fluidly connects 72 pieces, and the accumulation demonstrates the soul of innovation: i.e., film and music now become poetry. A man, obedient to “The Stars,” revels at the intricate beauty that’s given him such lifelong pleasure.

12/3/17

When I listened to “Ralph’s New Blues”

(Modern Jazz Quartet) the epiphany was

the music that remained when the melody

was removed — even for such as I who

can’t think of a better way to say

our love is here to stay than the song.

>>>

from

from "April 2019 Exemplars: Poetry Reviews" by Grace Cavalieri in Washington Independent Review of Books

• Grace Cavalieri
• April 11, 2019

Three Poets from Press 53: Shivani Mehta, Kathleen McGookey, and Leona Sevick (by Nin Andrews)

 

Every now and then I wake up in serious need of a poetry fix. I feel a kind of angst, as if I don’t quite fit in my skin. Maybe I’ve had bad dreams, or worse, the same old worry-dreams I’ve had for years. Or maybe I’m just tired—tired of the news, the weather, my own mind and spirit. I want something refreshing, something to wake me up, to make my day a little brighter.

I start looking for a poem, or a collection of poems, by poets I haven’t seen or heard enough from yet. Poets like Jamey Dunham—I’ve been waiting for a long time for his second book of poems. Or like Shivani Mehta, who blew me away with her first collection, Useful Information for the Soon-to-be Beheaded. Who could resist a book with a title like that? Or Kathleen McGookey, whose precise and breath-taking poems enchant me again and again. Or my latest discovery, Leona Sevick, whose insights and sly wit catch me off guard. 

Three of these poets have been published by Press 53, so I thought I’d post a poem by each of these women, though I should warn you, one poem is not enough to display the depth of their magic. Still, I think it might inspire readers to run out and find more of their work.

 

First, a poem published by PoetsArtists from Shivani Mehta whose recent poems are haunting and other-worldly. 

 

Exodus

 

When we were exiles my mother wrapped me in paper bags for warmth, carried me on her back as she walked for miles. Our shadows on the ground were one body, everything I saw was framed by her long black hair.  Sometimes we stopped in villages for shelter, never stayed for more than a night. We weren’t searching for anything holy, just a place where we could uncurl our fists. My mother told me I was born with the map on my back. I remember how, when we were lost, she used it to orient herself, her coarsened fingers undoing the buttons of my dress, smoothing the cloth from my shoulders, cities and towns asleep under her fingers. Once she said, your spine is the river, each vertebra is a path we could take.

 

Next, from Kathleen McGookey, a poem published by KYSO Flash. I love her surreal wit and sensibility.  

 

Taxonomy

 

Months later, when my husband finally scratched my bare back, the itchy center part I couldn’t reach, tiny sugar ants streamed out, then carpenter ants and termites, crickets and earwigs and millipedes, then silverfish, furry disoriented bumblebees, a few fireflies, green grasshoppers, and moths with large eyes glaring from their wings.  He leapt out of bed to scoop them into glass jars with metal lids and line them up on the headboard.  The snakes settled into the bathtub, its candlelit waters still smelling of vanilla and blood orange, little waves lapping the sides.  In Sharpie, he catalogued his find by genus and species on the back of his hand and forearm.  I missed the electricity of all those wings inside my skin.  This will never teach him, I thought.

 

And finally, from Leona Sevick, a poem from her book, Lion Brothers, which has me convinced that all I really need in order to solve my problems is “a fucking pot.” 

 

Self-help

 

First, get yourself a good cast iron pot. Don’t skimp.
You know what kind; you see them everywhere
and think Who would pay that much for a fucking pot?
You will. Go to every Marshalls, TJ Maxx, and
Home Goods in a hundred mile radius, and maybe
you’ll get lucky and find an odd colored one—
mustard yellow or baby shit brown—marked way down
because some people only care about how these things
look, not what they do. My aunt’s like this.
Had a pantry full of every kind—grill pan, Dutch oven,
braiser, you name it. I don’t think her manicured hand,
always holding a Virginia Slim, ever touched one.
Even if you don’t find one cheap, get one.
Steal it if you have to. I won’t judge.

 

Once you get your pot, you’ll know why you have it.
This pot can do anything and perfectly, every time.
Fancy a fry up? You have your pot. Need a twenty minute
cry? You’ll have a perfect risotto when it’s over.
Want to make grand statements with a heavy thud
while you’re tidying up? Turn to your pot. Soak it
for longer than 30 minutes and you’ll be able
to wipe whatever’s stuck to it free with a soft sponge.
No need for a man to provide elbow grease.

 

In old pictures of refugees, the ones that show women
with their bundles tied tight with string, there is always
a pot balanced on top of their precious possessions.
You’ll never wonder again what it means.

 

Shivani Mehta’s work has appeared in numerous journals and her full-length book of poetry, Useful Information for the Soon-to-be Beheaded, is out from Press 53.  Born in Mumbai, raised in Singapore, Shivani lives near Los Angeles with her family.

 

 

 

 

Kathleen McGookey’s fourth book of prose poems, Instructions for My Imposter, is forthcoming from Press 53. Her chapbook Nineteen Lettersis forthcoming from BatCat Press. Her work has appeared in journals including Crazyhorse, Denver Quarterly, Epoch, Field, Indiana Review, Ploughshares, The Prose Poem:  An International Journal, Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West, Rhino, Seneca Review, and West Branch. She has published three other books of poems, two chapbooks, and We’ll See, translations of French poet Georges Godeau’s prose poems. She lives in Middleville, Michigan, with her family.

 

 

Leona Sevick's work appears in The Journal, Crab Orchard Review, The Normal School, The Southeast Review, The Arkansas International and elsewhere. Her work also appears in The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks. She is the 2017 Press 53 Poetry Award Winner for her first full-length book of poems, Lion Brothers. Sevick was named a Tennessee Williams Scholar for the 2018 Sewanee Writers’ Conference and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She teaches Asian American literature at Bridgewater College, and she can be reached at leonasevick.com.

I Will Wear My Wounds in Chapters: Six Chapbooks

To Those Who Were Our First Gods
Nickole Brown
Rattle, 2018

Nickole Brown’s To Those Who Were Our First Gods explores the profound links between human beings and our animal kin. In language both colloquial and lyrically charged, Brown examines how predation and kindness play out on “this whole stubborn, / beautiful, fucked-up planet,” which is spinning toward ecological doom, pocked (at least, in America) by chain-stores and fostering “this clocked-in, bottled, florescent-lit existence.” In “A Prayer to Talk to Animals” Brown articulates the central impulse of the chapbook:

                        …Oh, forgive me, Lord,
    how human I’ve become, busy clicking
    what I like, busy pushing
    my cuticles back and back to expose
    all ten pale, useless moons.  Would you let me
    tell your creatures how sorry
    I am, let them know exactly
    what we’ve done? Am I not an animal
    too? If so, Lord, make me one again.
    Give me back my dirty claws and blood-warm
    horns, braid back those long-
    frayed endings of every nerve tingling
    with all I thought I had to do today.

To Those Who Were Our First Gods focuses on more than what we’ve lost by estranging ourselves from the natural world; it upholds and elegizes “that iridescent song,” “the soft and liquid cathedral” of the animal’s body, which, more often than not, ends up wrapped in a black bag and thrown away. Reading Brown’s poetry reminds one that to be an animal is to be alive in desire and suffering.

Traveling Cluster: Poems in Italy
David Giannini
New Feral Press, 2018

Traveling Cluster, David Giannini’s latest chapbook, is an incandescent travelogue, an homage to Italian culture,
a love note to Italy itself. Giannini details his travels through Rome, Florence, Venice, Tuscany, Umbria and elsewhere, while paying tribute to the likes of Michelangelo, Dante Alighieri, and Federico Fellini. Giannini’s masterful craftmanship, his humor, and his varied formal approaches make this chapbook a journey as enjoyable as the one the poet took himself. Traveling Cluster always remains cognizant of the English fascination with Italia; Byron, Shelley, and Shakespeare all receive mentions. “In Verona” affords one such instance:

    As if Shakespeare
    could turn in
    his grave after
    Giampiero
    our guide
    tells of Juliet’s
    balcony and her
    statue removed
    from the courtyard
    because thousands
    of tourist hands
    cracked
                    its bronze
    breasts
    by rubbing them
    “for luck in love”
    and I wonder
    does anybody
    care who
    now visits
    her perch and
    house walls
    fucked
    by graffiti.

Giannini quotes Anna Akhmatova early on in this chapbook: “Italy is a dream that keeps returning for the rest of your life.” How fortunate that the poems in Traveling Cluster allow one an immediate return to such a dream.

The Body as Passage
Nathan C. Lipps
Open Palm Print, 2019

Reading Nathan Lipps’s The Body as Passage calls to mind lines from Robert Bly’s translation of Goethe’s “The Holy Longing”: “I praise what’s truly alive, / What longs to be burned to death.” Lipps stacks and splinters images in a devotional poetry that seethes with life and longing. Grief, loss, and a reaching toward the sacred braid throughout the simple want at the center of these well-made poems. Lipps charts a certain type of spiritual loneliness against a stark midwestern backdrop—ruined barns amidst acres overgrown with black locust trees. The first poem of The Body as Passage, “Before Death,” exemplifies the strengths of the collection as a whole:

    A bird in the kitchen
    this morning.
    It was enough.
    A song among tangerine bowls.
    Near the open window
    atop the butcher-block table—
    grapefruit, 
                     a spoon.
                                    Unequivocal.
    Peering out into darkness.
    For Sunrise. 
    Knowing 
    it will blind.

    Too much.
                         Hallelujah. 
    Even the seeds.

Like many of Lipps’s other poems, “Before Death” proceeds austerely, with a quiet confidence, toward the ineffable. This chapbook, the first book by Lipps, surely presages strong work to come.

[GATES]
Sahar Muradi
Black Lawrence Press, 2017

Sahar Muradi’s [GATES] elegantly engages the dislocations inherent in language, war, and illness. Muradi’s chapbook deftly renders the fractured ruminations of a young person coming to terms with her father’s cancer and America’s war against her ancestral homeland. As the chapbook’s title suggests, each poem is a threshold, a point of departure, which is also a point of entry. The first poem of the book illustrates well this liminality:  

 

    The one that belonged to her
    The one where the light hit for the first time
    The one between our houses
    The one I crawled through to sleep on his chest
    The one the dog squeezed through
    The one at three over the candle and cake
    The one at three at the checkpoint
    The one between the earth and the sky, the refrigerator with wings
    The one where he met us after one year and was a stranger
    The one at the park, the one at Up Park, the one at Down Park
    The one that pierced my face and they pointed and laughed
    The one that took them away from me in a tube and sent them back to me tired
    The one he went through, hairs shooting out
    The one she went through, blood turning up
    The one we all went through to get to the blinking lights with the cherries
    The ones we put up when she was born
    The ones we passed to leave for good
    The ones we paid quarters to get through
    The one they learned the names of Presidents for
    The ones they needed social security numbers for
    The one I touched in the dark of my room
    The ones we couldn’t talk about, ever
    The one we had to close behind us to stay in, to keep neat, to not be tempted
    The one we tried to jump and failed
    The one he jumped and wasn’t forgiven
    The ones in the books that made animals of us
    The ones that told us who we weren’t
    The ones that hurt, that swung and cut and rattled long after they left
    The ones that kept flowers
    The one I went through to go north, to go abroad, to go east, to find my cardinal ways
    The one she went through too tired to find her way
    The one they have chosen to give them purpose
    The different one I have chosen
    The one I haven’t yet found
    The one I am looking through now with the narrow slots and passages unseen                                                                               

Here, as elsewhere in [GATES], Muradi combines a finely-attuned imagistic imagination with a bighearted embrace of the ordinary. Sahar Muradi writes as original and as compassionate a poetry as one would expect from a poet who proclaims: “I will wear my wounds in chapters.”

Spoiled Meat
Nicole Santalucia
Headmistress Press, 2018

Nicole Santalucia’s Spoiled Meat capers along the interstates and through the one-horse towns of central Pennsylvania, past and present. Santalucia’s antic foulmouthed lyric engagements with everyday life foreground the madcap and the astonishing; as she writes in “Barefooted Lesbians”: “Just yesterday I fell in love, I fell on the sidewalk, / I fell into a pile of jackknives.” Spoiled Meat explores the homophobia and the misogyny graffitied everywhere across the suburban and rural landscapes these poems render so well. Oftentimes, the poems address how violence intersects with misogyny and homophobia. “Supermarket Blowout” provides a characteristic example of this intersection in its final lines:

    The corn in aisle nine pops
    when you pay
    with your NRA Visa.
    In the gun-shaped produce section
    there’s a raffle for the 20-gauge-melon-
    pump-action with a 26-inch barrel.
    To enter, all you have to do
    is show up and say, I hate gays.

Santalucia’s response to this hatred is a surreal, slapstick, and, ultimately, vivifying humor. Don’t be afraid to walk barefoot across the cornhusks, shotgun shells, and chicken wing bones that litter the floor of these poems; the trek will provide you with many consolations, not the least of which is a good old-fashioned belly laugh in the face of the pure products of America as they continue to go crazy.

And God Created Women
Connie Voisine
Bull City Press, 2018

In the poem, “Via Dolorosa,” Connie Voisine writes: “What I took to be a ticket / turned out to be some kind of evil sprite / who might fill my mouth with cement…” And God Created Women levitates throughout, in just this way, between menace and magic. Voisine’s ultimate subject is the beleaguered and blessed self; as Voisine notes in “Self-Portrait as Sphinx”: “…Strewn is me, / not human, not any one thing, who must / accept the awful answer…” The poems in And God Created Women are barbed and beautiful, twisting with an ache that renders them unforgettable. The best poem in the collection, “(Her) Middle Ages,” consists of stutter steps, snippets of conversations, non sequiturs, and sentence fragments that accrue into an overwhelmingly powerful examination of the bonds between mothers and daughters; the poem begins: “I know men who would // rape you. That’s why. // As long as the sea is wild.”  Voisine’s poems pierce and rend; And God Created Women is the kind of chapbook that will wound you into remembering it.

---

Dante Di Stefano is the author of two poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016) and Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, 2019). Along with María Isabel Alvarez, he is the co-editor of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America (NYQ Books, 2018). 

An Erotic Soundtrack for The Best American Erotic Poetry: The Movie [by Catherine Bowman]

A highly subjective list after looking over my CDs and albums. 

1. All six tracks on the self-titled Johnny Hartman and John Coltrane album

2. “The Very Thought of You” as sung by Billie Holiday or Albert Collins

3. The Canadian Nick Gilder’s pop hit “Hot Child in the City” on The City Nights album

4. “Salt Marie Celeste” from Nurse with Wound. A lost ghost ship at sea. 

5. Portishead’s Dummy

6. Arto Lindsay’s cover of “Simply Beautiful” on Mundo Cililizado

7. Neil Young’s song “Harvest Moon”

8. Gal Costa singing “Dindi." Lyrics by Tom Jobim

9. Tony Joe White’s “Rainy Night in Georgia" as covered by Shelby Lynn.

10. Black Angels. Passover 

11. “Too Marvelous for Words,” lyrics by Johnny Mercer

  as recorded by Ella Fitzgerald or Frank Sinatra

12. Stevie Wonder’s song “As (Wonder)” from Songs in the Key of Life

13. Prince’s “If I was your Girlfriend”

14. All of the Sarah Vaughn in Hi-Fi album

*

Ok. Better stop now, though I did leave out my recordings of cheetahs purring.

Any additions?  Favorite make-out music or erotic soundtracks? 

Or what songs would you bring to a dirty song/dirty martini/clean underwear

 party? 

from the archives; originally published February 11, 2008

On Helen Forrest's birthday, "I remember you"

I always think of FDR's death on  April 12 but here's something nice to think about: Helen Forrest (nee Fogel) was born today.  Here she sings a Johnny Mercer lyric:

and wait till you hear this dame sing "Skylark" and "All the Things You Are." -- DL

Playing the Lines [by Terese Svoboda]

One of the first tasks I've given neophyte writers is to free associate for ten minutes and then lineate the last ten lines of their writing so it “looks” like poetry. I'm trusting that the mind automatically writes poetry versus prose, and that the unconscious seeks heightened language to make sense of emotion. Because the writer has by the ten minute mark usually run out of things to conceal and is onto more subconscious material, the lines are always looser and more interesting than if he had just begun to arduously write “a poem” in iambic pentameter, line by line. Chopping up the prose after the fact is easier for beginners than envisioning how those lines should look while composing them. The lesson for them is that the line breaks are decisions of the eye and the ear that aren't so difficult after the material has arrived, and the poet can more easily determine what to emphasize.

What about the reverse? Taking the line breaks out of a poem and turning it into prose? I'm reading The Book of Asa (Eyewear) by C.P. Mangel, a very smoothly done 635 page narrative poem about a black intellectual family transplanted to the South. Compelling characters, fabulous food-and-place descriptions, the Klu Klux Klan waiting to pounce, and coming-of-age momentum – but in rough blank verse. Why the but? The formal constraint strengthens the piece and nowhere does it feel forced – rather, it's a tour de force. But I think in this instance, the formal limits the audience, and an important work needs its audience. Okay, so not everybody will like the bacon kidney pie, pumpkin parsnip soup, liver custard, dove dumplings. I'm not sure being published in England (Eyewear's headquarters is London), gives the book the exposure it deserves, given its timeliness, but I do know getting such a big book published would be very difficult, perhaps even as fiction. Still, I keep imagining it without line breaks. Mangel, a lawyer with an MFA from the University of British Columbia, lives, according to google, in North Carolina. Her chapbook Laundry concerns hate crimes within the prison system.

How Can You Tell What It Is? A conversation with Victoria Redel [by Terese Svoboda]

 

Having published books of both fiction and poetry, Victoria Redel (above) and I are often asked how we differentiate between genres at the creative stage.

Terese Svoboda:

The beast presents itself, an image or a pre-occupation. Wrestling it into reasonableness sometimes results in abortions, monsters, and ephemera. Once I dreamt about a wild child hiding in amongst a herd of cattle. The dream kept returning. Not only the visual image, or in her case, the lack of one, drew me back, but the situation: how could she remain invisible? Did she exist or was she just some suppressed emotion? In contradiction to the injunction to write what you know, the most compelling subjects are more likely what you don't know, or what you know too little about. I wrote a poem about the dream which turned into a short story which slowly freed itself into a novella and ended, transformed, as a night of dance. Only the novella was published. Sometimes I'm a better craftsperson in one genre than another, or the subject is. Always I learn something about what I'm writing about when it's recast.

Victoria Redel:

Aside from being long or short, I can't always tell what I'm making. If the subject keeps drawing me back, it gets longer, either stanza-wise or across the page. If the lines offer a rhythm or a rhyme that I could revise around, that may be the start of a formal schema. If someone starts talking in what I'm writing, I wonder if it's a monologue and try interrogating to see if it's a dialogue. If it's a dialogue, then there's conflict and setting. Only poets get away with free-floating language.

Is one genre easier? Is one preferable?

Victoria Redel:

Those are questions I’m asked all the time. I’m guessing you are too, Terese. The simple answer is no and no, but let me unpack what that means. Like you, I started as a poet and despite having now published more books of fiction (5) than poetry(3), I still primarily think of myself as a poet. Maybe what that means is that I’m always thinking about language, how each word, each sentence shapes the whole. I’m interested in the shape of a work and that it’s my material, the actual placement of words, that create the arc and the architecture. I love syntax. I love the inherent music in syntax. In a poem, I’ve always loved the drive of the long sentence, the opportunity within a sentence to create layering of idea, of imagery, of implication. Conversely the pulled back, restrained sentence has an inherent of mystery. Also I've built on the way I build the moment in the poem, to shape how I build scenes. It's probably no surprise that all three novels have a collaged, layered narrative aspect.

But wait, I’m straying from your question and the answer. Another way to answer the original question is that whatever I’m not currently writing is what seems easier and preferable. In the thick middle of a novel, I start longing for the beauty of the poem, the way a single poem can be held on a page, held in my mind, memorized. I find myself announcing to friends how much I’m longing to finish the novel and start writing poems. But then heading back into poems, I’m back to beginner mind. What’s a poem? What can I do inside a poem that could matter? What interests me? And the poem feels so rigorous.

But to throw another complication in the mix—in many ways I feel the most rigorous form I work in is the short story. And when I get a story right, there is such intense pleasure in having managed the sustained intensity and world making demanded in the short story. It has it's own mathematics. How about you?

Terese Svoboda:

No genre is easy. Poetry is impossible, but it's short and thus enticing. Who doesn't want to be a magician and pull something so alive out of a hat? If it's good it looks easy. Poetry does without the labor of characters and plot, although one could say dealing graphically with the white space is as formidable an element as either of those. Besides, there's the intoxication of words, the writer's fist love, and all their cryptic connotations, getting them lined up to evoke meaning together, or subterfuge. Although I hate to say it, my love of, and scrutiny for words puts me closest to lawyers.

I laughed, rueful, reading about your longing for poetry when you're writing prose and vice versa. The grass is always greener – for a while. Then you're out chewing on the same stuff, sure ease, profundity, brilliance just a genre away. Like maybe writing an essay? I've written biography, (particularly bad) screen plays, librettos, plays, reviews, music videos, introductions, afterwords, biography, lectures, memoir as well as novels, stories and poems. My hair is thin from all the pulling out, why, it's turned white! I've been going through my papers and it's shocking what I've resorted to, needing money or just challenge.

Perhaps the question I've posed – what genre is easier or preferable – never gets answered because as poets, we are always hoping to renew language, and genre is a construct, something every ambitious writer plans to renew, and oops! finds difficult at every turn.

All genre provide pain. But writers do have proclivities, expertise in plot or a drive to rhyme. What's easy isn't necessarily the best. I hate writing that. I've read belabored work, I've written it. But sometimes – more seldom than sometimes – it is easy. It falls onto the page, the rabbit leaps from the hat, and all you have to do is arrange it. Hopefully, you have the tools to know how. The only way to get that experience is to try writing a poem or a novel or a story or a libretto. I like having a lot of tools.

With a short story, I write myself into a corner, and that's the point. It's not like a novel that takes the reader by the hair and drags him through. A short story flirts and betrays and well, does it, and you're lying there, panting. But that's true of a poem as well. You have to write fast and rewrite slow.

"The Mysterious Arrival of an Unusual Letter" [by Mark Strand] (on his birthday, April 11)

 

It had been a long day at the office and a long ride back to the small apartment where I lived. When I got there I flicked on the light and saw on the table an envelope with my name on it. Where was the clock? Where was the calendar? The handwriting was my father’s, but he had been dead for forty years. As one might, I began to think that maybe, just maybe, he was alive, living a secret life somewhere nearby. How else to explain the envelope? To steady myself, I sat down, opened it, and pulled out the letter. “Dear Son,” was the way it began. “Dear Son” and then nothing.

 

---

See https://www.npr.org/2012/01/02/144445061/poetic-perfection-three-favorite-poems-of-2011

Joey Bishop Hosts the Tonight Show (4/10/65)

 

 

For Prose Writers Who Want to Write Poetry: A Reading List [by Terese Svoboda]

Prose writers make sparks through character and plot, endlessly blackening the page from one margin to the other. But there are some who recognize that sometimes emotion needs to breath. I like to point those prosestitutes (as Walcott used to call them) toward the prosy end of poetry. These poems present the idea of word choice and white space as muscle, poems that are not just the co-opted regulation subject-verb-object but also are not dauntingly complex syntactically. Seemingly. Five books of poetry for fiction writers who really want to jettison their agents and struggle in the poet's pure genre:

The Performance of Becoming Human by Daniel Borzutzky. How to take prose lines and hold them in poetic tension.

Childhood of an Equestrian by Russell Edson. Master of the funny dialogue prose poem.

Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich. Have you read it lately? It's so clear it burns. It also teaches line break strategy plus advocacy.

The Movie At the End of the World by Tom McGrath. Blacklisted but a poet with a breath like Whitman who takes history and America head on.

All-Night Lingo Tango by Barbara Hamby.  A funny mix of high and pop cultural references turned into formally strict, lyrically extravagant poems. Shows how form can be your friend.

So You Want to Write Fiction [by Terese Svoboda]

Five books of fiction for poets to read who want to be fiction writers (and a bonus memoir)chosen with enough word play to engage the poetic habit, and just enough plot. My theory is that poets sidle up to prose most easily if it exhibits some of the flash of poetry. Examples abound of the standard 19^th century character-and-plot focus. If poets want to advance the cause of prose by revamping the sentence by plundering their craft, it's possible as long as they get a handle on narrative drive. I wrote a hundred stories before that previous sentence made much sense – Surprise! was my best.

Sixty Stories especially Donald Barthelme. The king of metafiction breaks it down. Especially easy to see narrative effects in “The Glass Mountain” with its numbered sentences and seemingly simple sentences.

The Assault by Reinaldo Arenas. Gay-Cuban-man-turned monster tries to kill his mother. Short chapters that suggest fiction writing isn't impossible, and organized as a quest, a form that is hard to screw up.

Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson. Perhaps better than her poetry, this short book is a primer in co-opting fictional structures for poetic ends.

Minor Angels by Antoine Volodine. Read any chapter in any order. Mongolian grandmothers of the future try to kill a grandson for political reasons. The points-of-view go way distort-o. Sci-fi at its most literary.

The Passport by Herta Muller. She received a Nobel for the way she torqued sentences. Don't bother me with Updike.

Self Portrait in Green by Marie N'Diaye. Ok, so it's memoir, but it reads like very strange fiction, and proves a prose writer can steal from poets without sounding effete.

THE POETRY QUESTION [by Dave Morice]

What is poetry?

Here is a modern approach to answering that ancient question. The following list contains genuine quotes about “poetry,” “poet,” etc. by famous writers throughout the ages. However, those particular words have been replaced with “pornography,” “pornographer,” etc., in order to update the muse’s out-dated definitions, as you will see.

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is pornography. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is pornography. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?

                                                  Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

                                                  Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson [1824]

Pornography is the supreme fiction, madame.

                                                    Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)

                                                    A High-toned Old Christian Woman [1923]

You don’t make pornography with ideas, but with words.

                                                     Stephane Mallarme (1842-1898)

                                                     Paul Valery, Degas, Danse, Dessin

I wish our clever young pornographers would remember my homely definitions of prose and pornography; that is, prose = words in their best order; pornography = the best words in their best order.

                                                     Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

                                                     In Table Talk [July 12, 1827]

Pornography must be as well written as prose.

                                                     Ezra Pound (1885-1972)

                                                     Letter to Harriet Monroe [January 1915]

Taught or untaught, we all scribble pornography.

                                                     Horace (65-8 BC)

                                                     Epistles, bk II, 4 BC bk III (Ars Poetica)

For pornography is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion.

                                                     Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)

                                                     Introduction to Ward, English Pornographers [1880]

 Pornographers are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

                                                     Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

                                                     A Defense of Poetry [1821]

Pornographer’s unnat’ral; no man ever talked pornography ‘cept a beadle on Boxin’ Day.

                                                    Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

                                                     Pickwick Papers [(1836-1837)

Pornography—

   all of it—

      is a trip into the unknown.

                                                     Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930))

                                                     Conversation with a Tax Collector about Poetry [1926]

The lunatic, the lover, and the pornographer

Are of imagination all compact…

                                                     William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

                                                     A Midsummer-Night’s Dream IV, 218

Pornography is a way of taking life by the throat.

                                                     Robert Frost  (1874-1963)

                                                     Comment

All pornographers are mad.

                                                     Richard Burton (1577-1640)

                                                    Anatomy of Melancholy, Democritus to the Reader

With me pornography has been not a purpose, but a passion;….

                                                     Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

                                                     The Raven and Other Pornography [1845]

I have said that pornography is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.

                                                     William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

                                                     Lyrical Ballads, preface

Immature pornographers imitate; mature pornographers steal.

                                                     T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)

                                                     Philip Massinger [1920]

To a pornographer nothing can be useless.

                                                     Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

                                                     Rasselas [1759]

A pornographer is the most unpornographic of anything in existence; because he has no identity—he is continually informing—and filling some other body.

                                                     John Keats ( 1795 -1821)

                                                     Letter to Richard Woodhouse

I am obnoxious to each carping tongue,

Who says, my hand a needle better fits,

A Pornographers Pen, all scorne, I should thus wrong;

For such despight they cast on female wits;….

                                                     Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672)

                                                     The Prologue

All a pornographer can do is warn.

                                                     Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)

                                                     Preface to the Pornograpnhers

A vein of Pornography exists in the hearts of all men.

                                                     Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)]

                                                     The Hero as Poet

Pornography is made by fools like me,

But only God can make a tree.

                                                     Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918)

                                                     Trees [1913]

Pornography must be as new as foam, and as old as the rock.

                                                     Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

                                                     Journal [March 1845]

Music is the universal language of mankind—pornography their universal pastime and delight.

                                                     Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)

                                                     Outre-Mer (1833-1834)

A true account of the actual is the rarest pornography, for common sense always takes a hasty and superficial view.

                                                     Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

                                                     A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers [1849] 

 Pornography should be palpable and mute

Pornography should be wordless

Pornography should be motionless in time

Pornography should be equal to:

Not true.

Pornography should not mean

But be.

                                                     Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982)

                                                     Ars Poetica [1926]

  In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,

The raw material of pornography in

     all its rawness and

        that which is on the other hand

           genuine, you are interested in pornography.

                                                     Marianne Moore (1887-1972)

                                                     Pornography [1935]

 To have great pornographers, there must be great audiences, too.

                                                     Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

                                                     Leaves of Grass. So Long.                       

The Dead Horse: Prose Poetry [by Terese Svoboda]

The question of whether prose poetry is poetry is no longer. After Anne Carson trained us to see
poems in diffuse dialogue and (sometimes awkward) chunks of imagery, the meditations of the
French prose poets of Ponge and Baudelaire seem quaint. We have moved on: if the language holds
the page, it counts as poetry, whether it be in blocks or scattered syllables or tweets. What is the
virtue of maintaining the question? Quarantine for poets who can't rhyme or maintain rhythm or
even break a line properly? A place for beginning literary aesthetes lured into appreciating poetry
by the lack of puzzling line breaks, the equivalent to those still moving their lips while reading?
With lyric poetry, readers want to dwell within the complexities of a poem carefully placed in its
white space, yet the eyes will still move, they drift toward THE END. Is the next stanza worth my
time? What about the next line? Will the poet go postmodern and end midway, leaving a whole lot
of resonating whiteness? There's always the possibility with lyric of the epiphanic drama queen.
Can you trust a prose poetry to deliver the goods when it's just doggedly returning the carriage (to
invoke a luddite analogy).

The problem for all poetry is holding the page, that is to say, enticing us to read it. Prose poetry
refuses the use of refreshing white space, it employs no stanzaic cliff-hangers or exciting line breaks
to lure the reader forward. The most boring instruction book breaks up its prose with illustrations, and keeps its sentences short. Does the block of prose invite with its sneaky prose-like structure, or repel with its serious wad of words? Prose poets accrete narrative drive in the surprise of the imagery in such a sequence, in the assonance and consonance between words, in the cumulative weight of the stanzas. Instead of producing the novel's dead body, the prose poem evokes intensity from margin to margin. The more wily prose poets (W.C. Williams to Maureen Seaton and on) use all of those, plus dialogue or madlibs or menus or advertising or recipes, a whole shivaree of associations.

Prose poetry rides free!

There's always payment. Would a more stanzaic form better present the poet's material? Some
poets, like Daniel Boroztsky in The Performance of Becoming Human space between end-stopped lines to give it a “couplet look.” What about Latasha Nevada Diggs's Twerk and her taunting poems spaced out in various languages, looking, for the most part, pretty darn prosey – but rely heavily on prose footnotes at the end of the book? "Out of the strong came forth sweetness." The dead lion (okay, not a horse) on the label of the Golden Syrup attracts bees, and thus honey.

Terese Svoboda, Guest Author April 8-12

This week we welcome Terese Svoboda as our guest author. Terese has published 18 books of fiction, poetry, memoir, biography, and a book of translation from the Nuer. Great American Desert, a book of stories, has just appeared. Winner of a Guggenheim, a Bobst Prize in fiction, an Iowa Prize for poetry, a NEH grant for translation, an O. Henry Award for the short story, the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, 3 NYFA fellowships, a Pushcart Prize for the essay, a Bellagio residency for a libretto, and the Jerome Foundation Award in video, she also wrote the libretto for the opera WET that premiered at L.A.'s RedCat Theater. "Terese Svoboda is one of those writers you would be tempted to read regardless of the setting or the period or the plot or even the genre.”--Bloomsbury Review.

Welcome, Terese

-- sdl