The Best American Poetry

Assignment 5 — Shannon Holman

God's dice always have a lucky roll.
~Sophocles, Fragments l, 763

To round out the week, let's play some dice.  Your assignment is to fold several paper cubes (here's a pdf template, and here's an online tool for generating printable word dice.) 

Write a word or phrase on each side of each die.  I usually have six verbs on one die, six adverbs on another, and so on, so that by rolling several dice at a time I end up with a complete sentence.  

I don't reckon he used this technique, but one of my favorite poems, by the Hungarian poet Sándor Weöres, seems like a great model for what this kind of approach can yield:

 

Dice Game

to be lost then found again
my whole life has been that way
it was good to sit beside the sea
to let the waves wash over me
            
my whole life has been that way
to be lost then found again
to let the waves wash over me
it was good to sit beside the sea
            
to let the waves wash over me
it was good to sit beside the sea
to be lost then found again
my whole life has been that way

it was good to sit beside the sea
to let the waves wash over me
my whole life has been that way
to be lost then found again

 

-- Sándor Weöres

translated by William Jay Smith

Assignment 4 — Shannon Holman

Every time I go to Myanmar*, my first stop is the Yangon book market, which consists of several "shops"—blankets spread on the thronged sidewalk—piled with hundreds of volumes, many of which are tattered English primers dating from the days of colonial rule. 

In the same way that a conversation with a non-native English speaker can make the whole language seem fresh, even the simplest declarative sentences in these old books can feel full of significance and portent. 

 

Today's assignment is to write a mystery novel in the shape of a poem using as many of the following sentences and phrases as you like.

Rachel and Mitch at McDonalds 5-12-2011

We've been going to McDonalds in the morning for the past few weeks. At this early hour I look even more like Pruneface than usual. I'm grateful to Rachel for being seen with me, much less hanging out with me. I'm also grateful for her discussing Bible stories with me in a completely unselfconscious way. There are points in the clip where we may seem ironic or sarcastic -- but no. As Hemingway wrote, this is a "clean well-lighted place." Or at least fairly clean, and the oatmeal is a little too sweet.

Andrew Marvell's "Bermudas"

See Tom Clark's blog entry with Marvell's wonderful poem and some joyous photographs from Bermuda.

Assignment 3 — Shannon Holman

Great artists steal.

For today's assignment, let's continue to play with the notions of indeterminacy and appropriation as tools to combat the twin demons of The Anxiety of Influence and The Blank Page (which I find it oddly helpful to picture as masked wrestlers).

Here's a grab bag of techniques you can try:

WHEN You Are CRAZY You Take OFF Your CLOTHES [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dear Bleaders, 

In my first poetry book, The Next Ancient World, there is a poem called Naked, in which I talk about being so crazy with rage and shame (that's what we are crazy with, when we are crazy) that I feel like going outside naked.

I'm thinking of it today because of this Naked Man in the News. It is worth a look, my friend. Not safe for work.

And here, read this.

Naked

The reason you so often in literature have a naked woman

walk out of her house that way, usually older, in her front garden

or on the sidewalk, oblivious, is because of exactly how I feel right now.

 

You tend to hear about how it felt to come upon such a mythical beast,

the naked woman on the street, the naked man in a tree, and that makes

sense because it is wonderful to take the naked woman by the hand

 

And know that you will remember that moment for the rest of your life

because of what it means, the desperation, the cataclysm of what it takes

to leave your house naked or to take off your clothes in the tree.

 

It feels good to get the naked man to come down from there by a series

of gentle commands and take him by the elbow or her by the hand and lead

him to his home like you would care for a bird or a human heart.

 

Still if you want instead, for once, to hear about how the person came to be

standing there, naked, outside, you should talk to me right now, quickly,

before I forget the details of this way that I feel.  I feel like walking out.

 

I think of Yossarian in his tree in Catch 22:

Yossarian went about his business with no clothes on all the rest of that day and was still naked late

the next morning when Milo, after hunting everywhere else, finally found him sitting up a tree a

small distance in back of the quaint little military cemetery at which Snowden was being buried.

Assignment 2 — Shannon Holman

Selection is a form of invention.

For today's assignment, make like a gambler: Shuffle Up and Deal.  Why spent thousands on seminars, self-help books, and therapy to help you deal with the crippling, quotidian fear of the blank page, when you can simply whip out a pair of sharp scissors, spend a happy hour or two decimating the writing of others, and then turn it into a non-magnetic poetry confetti?

If you want to get started before you've made your own stash of lines and titles to stitch together cento-style, here's a starter kit:

 

Depressing Quote of the Day

"There is no weight heavier than the body of a woman one has ceased to love."

                Anonymous

-- sdh

This Just In: Leigh Wells in Brooklyn, Jennifer Knox at NYU

We've been following the writing/photography/filmmaking career of Leigh Wells ever since we met her upon her return from a two year stint as a Peace Corp volunteer in Mongolia.  We're excited to learn that Leigh's new work will be part of the Spring Emerging Artist Show show that opens tomorrow night and runs through May 29 at the Rabbithole Studio in Dumbo, Brooklyn:

Wednesday, May 11
5-9 PM
33 Washington Street, Brooklyn, NY
Directions here.

NYU's Lillian Vernon House is a great place for a reading and the Friday @ 5 Happy Hour series is inspired, especially when Jennifer Knox is among the readers, as she will be this Friday, May 13:

Friday, May 13
5:00 pm
Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House,
58 West 10th Street, NYC
Details here

-- sdh

Maugham on "the I who writes"

"But the I who writes is just as much a character in the story as the other persons with whom it is concerned. He may be the hero or he may be an onlooker or a confidant. But he is a character. The writer who uses this device is writing fiction, and if he makes the I of his story a little quicker on the uptake, a little more level-headed, a l;ittle shrewder, a little braver, a little wiser than he, the writer, really is, the reader must show indulgence. He must remember that the author is not draweing a faithful portrait of himself, but creating a character for the particular purposes of his story."

-- from the Preface, The Collected Short Stories of W. Somerset Maugham

Assignment 1 — Shannon Holman

Thanks to Stacey and the BAP blog for the chance to be this week's guest blogger.  I thought I'd use this space and time to suggest some writing assignments and invite you to post your responses on your own blogs, letting us all know about it via trackback or in the comments

— Shannon (no relation) Holman

I'm just back from a week spent on the former campus of Black Mountain College, so today's assignment will feature some of those giant ghosts.

See how many of these prompts you can respond to in a single piece:

1. John Cage appeared on at least two game shows, appearing twice on I've Got a Secret and five times on the Italian show "Lascia o Raddoppia," where he won 5 million lire answering questions about mushrooms.  On what game or reality show will you appear, revealing which secret or talent? 
2. Hilda Morley is one overlooked Black Mountain poet.  You are another.
3. Buckminster Fuller: "Everything you've learned in school as "obvious" becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines." Discuss.
4. The dyslexic are your intended audience.
5. "...to open eyes..." —Josef Albers

Quote of the Day

Those who go on to be proper writers are those who can forgive themselves the horrors of the first draft.

Alain d Botton

Shannon Holman, Guest Blogger May 8-14

 This week we welcome Shannon Holman as our guest blogger.  Shannon's poems have appeared in Crowd, Diagram, Goodfoot, La Petite Zine, Lodestar Quarterly, Pierogi Press, and elsewhere. She studied poetry at Oberlin College and New School University. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. Find out more about Shannon here.

Welcome, Shannon.

-- sdh

Don't Miss Event of the Season - Mitch Sisskind to Read at KGB Bar, Monday, May 9, 7:00 PM

Poet, fiction writer, scholar, and BAP blog contributor Mitch Sisskind will make a rare east coast visit to read at KGB Bar on Monday night. Mitch Sisskind is a licenced gemologist from Chicago.  He is the author of two books of short fiction, Visitations and Dog Man Stories. He edits The Stud Duck, a literary magazine. Mitch has been called "one of the funniest writer in America" (Michael Silverblatt, Bookworm, WKCR). Mitch Sisskind is also a maverick scholar.  In Divine Deception: The Inner Gender of Gender (Earl University Press) he unravels the secret hoaxes that have masked the sexuality of many authors of Western Literature-from the Bible to the internet.  Mitch has been called "one of the funniest writer in America" (Michael Silverblatt, Bookworm, WKCR).   Listen to his fascinating Bookworm (WKCR) interview here. Mitch discusses Closing the Circle: An Oulipean Tale of Air Travel here. And he talks about pit bulls and the people who love them here. His poem "Like a Monkey" is included in The Best American Poetry 2009. 

7:00 PM
KGB Bar
85 East 4th Street
New York, NY 10003-8904
(212) 505-3360 

Top Fivers for the Future – APIA Poetry – Kenji C. Liu

For this seventh and final post for APA Heritage Month, I posed a couple of prompts to all the guest bloggers from this past week–Patricia Y. Ikeda, Iris A. Law, Barbara Jane Reyes, Gerald Maa, and myself. As a way to provide readers some way to explore on their own, the first prompt was to list their personal top five APIA poets.

From Iris A. Law (Lantern Review):

1. Kimiko Hahn
I had studied the poem "The Artist's Daughter" as an undergrad, but it wasn't until last year that I finally read the eponymous collection (W.W. Norton 2004)–and I was blown away by its beautiful, but unflinching treatment of the human body. I recently read Hahn's most recent collection, Toxic Flora (W.W. Norton 2010)--which juxtaposes human experience with alternately lovely and bizarre tidbits drawn from the New York Times' science section–and absolutely loved it, too (what is there not to love about a speaker who imagines herself into the roles of a giant squid and a female praying mantis?).  

2. Li-Young Lee
I would be amiss not to mention Lee in my list. He is the first Asian American poet whose work that I really came to know and love in college (even before I knew that there was a whole community of actively-producing Asian American poets out there). The very first signed book of poetry that I ever owned was a copy of Rose (BOA Editions 1986), which Lee inscribed for me with a few improvisational lines of verse about my first name. Though my critical and aesthetic interests, craft, and repertoire have fluctuated as I have grown as a poet, the tenderness and liquid clarity of Lee's work continues to move me. His most recent collection, Behind my Eyes (W.W. Norton 2009), is marvelously expansive in vision, and is worth buying in hardcover for the accompanying CD recording of him reading poems from the collection (Lee has a surprisingly soothing reading voice; as he confesses in one poem, his wife regularly falls asleep while he's talking to her).

3. Sarah Gambito
I've recently found myself very turned onto Sarah Gambito's work. I love the strangeness of it: the way her images float and lightly inhabit the space of each poem; and I love her sonics (which are soft and sensual, but slippery–like silk sliding off a bed). There's a strategic resonance to the stillness that pervades her work–it's like being in what musicians like to call a "live" room. I love something that she said about her process in an interview with the Fordham Observer: "I try to just be as still as I can in the city. If you can do that, it's almost impossible for poems not to come to you." I highly recommend both of her collections: Delivered (Persea 2009) and Matadora (Alice James Books 2004)

4. Oliver de la Paz
I love the searing sense of vision that inhabits de la Paz's work, as well as the arc and music of his voice–his poems truly sing. I've written before on the Lantern Review Blog about my appreciation for a couple of his "Aubade . . . " poems (see here and here). In his most recent collection, Requiem for the Orchard (U of Akron Press 2010), de la Paz applies his expansive gaze to the project of portraying the complexities of male adolescence with a deliciously intense, yet joyous abandon.  

5. Barbara Jane Reyes
I hope it's not too tacky to include one of my fellow guest posters on my list, but I really am a big fan of Barbara Jane Reyes's work! I love the way that her poetics combine the close, tender gaze of the lover with a mythic scope that spans oceans and centuries: her speaker(s) possess a goddess-like wisdom and a vigilant radiance that defy both time and body. I also love the depth and intelligence of her politics and the fact that and she practices what she preaches, from generosity to literary activism (c.f. her critically astute blog, which I have quoted in academic papers before). Poeta en San Francisco (Tinfish 2006)–her second book–is a favorite of mine, but her most recent collection Diwata (BOA Editions 2010) is gorgeous in its own right, too.

 

From Barbara Jane Reyes:

1. Frances Chung
Native of NY Chinatown, author of Crazy Melon and Chinese Apple, edited by Walter K. Lew, and published posthumously by Wesleyan University Press. I’ve previously written about her at the Poetry Foundation.

2. Craig Santos Perez
Chamoru poet, author of from unincorporated territory [hacha] (Tinfish Press), and from unincorporated territory [saina] (Omnidawn).

3. Suheir Hammad
Palestinian American poet, 2010-2011 Artist-in-Residence at NYU’s A/P/A Program, and author of Born Palestinian, Born Black (reissued by UpSet Press, 2010), breaking poems, and ZaatarDiva (both from Cypher Books). I have previously written about breaking poems at the Poetry Foundation.

4. Truong Tran
Bay Area based Vietnamese American poet and educator, author of The Book of Perceptions (Kearny Street Workshop Press), Placing the Accents, dust and conscience, within the margin, and Four Letter Words (Apogee Press).

5. I am going to cheat here, and name three up and coming Pinay poets: Rachelle Cruz, Niki Escobar, and Yael Villafranca. Look out for them. They’re gonna go places.

 

From Gerald Maa (Asian American Literary Review):

1. Jose Watanabe

2. Larissa Lai

3. Fred Wah

4. Hiromi Ito

5. Wayne Kaumualii Westlake

 

From Kenji C. Liu (Kartika Review):

I definitely echo two of Barbara Jane Reyes’ picks – Suheir Hammad and Craig Santos Perez. Since Reyes has already mentioned these two, I’ll give you three more:

3. Agha Shahid Ali
Ali’s Call Me Ishmael Tonight (2004), Rooms Are Never Finished (2003), and The Country Without a Post Office (1998) are my personal favorites of his work. A Kashmiri American, he weaves Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic and Western poetic metaphors and forms into extremely lush and lyrical poetry.

4. Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Nezhukumatathil’s books are Lucky Fish (2011), Miracle Fruit (2003), and At the Drive-In Volcano (2007).

5. Bao Phi
Bao Phi is a spoken word poet who has been published in various anthologies and in a chapbook, Surviving the Translation. He is a community activist, and his work often comes from this context. He has a book of poems forthcoming from Coffee House Press.

 

Patricia Y. Ikeda chose to respond to my second prompt, “what is the future of APIA poetry?”

The Future of APIA poetry? I think it...

1. Will, as a category, stimulate push back and envelope explosion regarding who and what an “Asian American” is and who or what a “Pacific Islander American” is. And it will continue to generate more understanding of multiracial identities and more hapaness. If you don’t know the term “hapa,” Google it. I heard a few years back that my kid had suddenly become a hapa because the definition had just been expanded to include people of intra-API heritages, like Japanese Korean American and Chinese Hawai’ian American. I won’t rest until I hear someone say, “As American as Mom, home, apple pie, and banh mi.”

2. Will utilize new technologies to take digital storytelling to the next levels, bringing voices, sounds, music, visual images, archival footage, together so that our cultures and questions and faces are fully present, both close and up front, and also in the context of historical events and movements. And all of this, like YouTube – which I think of as the Ālaya-vijñāna (storehouse consciousness) of contemporary society – accessible to just about everyone and containing just about everything. See this link if you want to muse on the insubstantial and ever-morphing nature of constructed identities arising from gazillions of perception-based thoughts, then apply it to APIA poetry, and you’ve got a description of its future. You may quote me on this.

3. Will continue to do what only poetry can do, revealing and exploring the many worlds through language, as jazz composer and musician Francis Wong once wrote me, “in solidarity and in sound.”

On behalf of all the contributors this past week, I offer gratitude to The Best American Poetry for making this week available to us. We’ve shared some of what we consider to be the best Asian Pacific Islander American poetry, which is also some of the best American poetry. May the information shared this week inform, challenge, and inspire.

 

~ Kenji C. Liu

If you're in the San Francisco Bay Area and want to check out some APIA poets, check out the upcoming Literary Night at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center on May 12, and Kartika Review's We Axe You To Speak poetry reading at the San Francisco Public Library (Main) on May 31.

 

Meet the Press: Nin Andrews interviews Mary Biddinger, editor of the Akron Series in Poetry

NA: I’d like you to tell me a little bit about the Akron Series in Poetry. How many books of poetry does the University of Akron Press print each year?

MB:  We currently publish three books of poetry a year. One is the winner of the annual Akron Poetry Prize, and the other two are either books by continuing authors (such as John Minczeski’s A Letter to Serafin or Alison Pelegrin’s forthcoming Hurricane Party), or editor’s choice selections usually taken from the pool of prize submissions.

We’ve also recently started the Akron Series in Contemporary Poetics, which is a separate series aimed at publishing volumes of criticism. Our first title, The Monkey and the Wrench: Essays into Contemporary Poetics, debuted in January. This series seeks to give contemporary poetics a home in print. So much intelligent writing takes place online, which is wonderful, but I also feel as if it deserves promotion in print form.

NA: Do you pick the winner, or do you have guest judges some years?

MB: We have a guest judge every year, and I am dedicated to choosing a very different sort of judge every year. Last year we had G.C. Waldrep, and this year we have Natasha Sajé. I am someone who grows weary of seeing the same judges everywhere, so I try to think beyond the obvious choices. I also think it’s important for a press to reflect and support a variety of sensibilities, so switching up the judges helps.

I personally read every single manuscript that crosses the transom. If I recognize a manuscript as being by an acquaintance or a friend, I pass it along to an outside reader or two. I’m a friendly person and feel a great sense of affection toward so many people in the poetry world, and I believe it’s best for me to have many eyes on the manuscript, in the interest of fairness. We pass the finalists, and sometimes the semifinalists as well, along to the judge, and then the decision is out of our hands.

NA: How would you describe your job as a series editor? What are the rewards and challenges?

MB: I would describe my job as dreamy. I have always loved to read, and I have the sort of mind that tinkers with whatever it’s reading, so editorial work is a perfect fit. In the summers I read poetry manuscripts all day, and I never become bleary-eyed or disenchanted. The poetry manuscript will never become anything less than a work of art for me, and no matter how many hundreds of manuscripts I read, I will never forget how emotional the thing itself is. These submissions mean so much to their creators, and I want to treat them with tremendous respect, even reverence.

The largest reward is being able to promote poetry, and help writers move forward in their lives (both within and outside poetry) thanks to the support of the press. I was not a cheerleader in high school, but I certainly am now when it comes to promoting my authors and their accomplishments. I also just love to read new poetry, and to identify trends in the manuscripts I read. One year there were a ton of ghazals. Then there were lots of abstract epistolary poems. We always, always get multitudes of bird poems, too.

In terms of the challenges, there’s really just one: having to decline manuscripts. It absolutely breaks my heart. Every year I want to publish ten, or even twenty, of the manuscripts we receive. When the rejections go out, my heart just drops. Beginning this year, we are hoping to be able to send more personalized responses to folks who do not win the contest. We recently transitioned from SASEs to notifying via website post, and I’d like to at least be able to send some emails to people with particularly promising manuscripts.

Questioning the Book: APIA Poetry and the Politics of Language – Kenji C. Liu

“If my freedom were not in the book, where would it be?
If my book were not my freedom, what would it be?
Truth cannot but be violent. There is no peaceable truth.
[...]
The violence of the book is turned against the book: battle without mercy.”

from The Book of Margins, Edmond Jabes

In The Book of Margins, Edmond Jabes instigates a deep questioning of writing by writing. He comes to this through a practice of Jewishness that lives through a deeply dialogical relationship with the book. In this practice, what is written is not Truth, but something to be wrestled with. What posits itself as Truth is violent because it sets itself up as unquestionable and one-size-fits-all. So he sets about digging holes into writing with his writing.

I believe it is useful to think about Asian Pacific Islander American (APIA) poetry in this way. In my view, many APIA poets cross lines and challenge truths about what is American, Asian, and Pacific Islander. I believe many of us, consciously or not, have to confront at some point the idea that we are not fully any of these things, because the default position of each, the Truth, has no room for those who exceed the categories.

 
Recently, Barbara Jane Reyes posted on her blog in "Writing Culture in Diwata (y Poeta)" about an incident where a colleague questioned her use of non-English words in her poetry–“There has to be a reason for it.” I think the same must be said of English. Yes, we are in the United States. But why should everyone write in English? There are plenty of historical and political reasons–racialization, sexual violence, homophobia, nationalism, and more, that have made English the unquestioned default and relegate millions to monolingualism. Once we ask why, once we question the (English) book, we raise the specter of the Truth and how it got to be that way. I think of the APIA activist slogan in response to the racism of “go back to where you came from” – “We’re here because you were there.”

APIA poets have always written in many native languages–English, Creole, Pidgin, the multitudes of languages and dialects that somehow fit under the designation of Asian and Pacific Islander, and some that don’t. (See for example, Rajiv Mohabir’s poem examined in my first post in this series.) Personally, I find inspiration in Adrienne Rich when she writes in the context of patriarchy, “This is the oppressor's language // yet I need it to talk to you”. One’s “natural” relationship to a language should not be taken for granted, especially if it’s the dominant language.

Light Delights in Life: Two API Poets From the Americas – Gerald Maa

James Baldwin starts off a masterful essay called “A Fly in Buttermilk” by saying, “I found myself, willy-nilly, alchemized into an American the moment I touched French soil.” When approached with this prompt, I immediately wondered, “forget being an American, what does it mean to become an American?” Here are two poets from the Americas, well-laurelled and vastly popular in other countries, but virtually unknown in the United States.

José Watanabe (1946-2007) is Japanese Peruvian poet, one of Peru’s most celebrated writers. He spent his early life on a sugar plantation, but moved to Trujilo in time for his schooling. In addition to poetry, Watanabe has written children’s books and screenplays. In a poem titled “Grandson,” he describes himself as “furiously decomposing,” a phrase that seems appropriate in describing the craft and sensibility that guides his poems: “when the scrutinizing certainty of science / is insufferable, / I, furiously decomposing, insist the doctors/ believe me, we cannot die of a failing organ / unless it sparks a secret metamorphosis / until it matures into an animal ready to abandon us.”

That animal, a haunting one that populates many of Watanabe’s poems in different shapes, reminds me of Kafka’s. A poem titled “The Sole” starts off: “My life depends on the tireless mimicry of sand hues, but this subtle trick that lets me eat and frustrate enemies has deformed me.” The deforming, decomposing after-effect of the human imagination drives these poems, in both content and craft, dissolving to recreate as the only possibility for preserving this organic life, one autonomous of us, and always on the verge of departing.

Born in Tokyo, Hiromi Itō now divides her time between Encinatas, California and Kumamoto, Japan. Throughout the 1980s she wrote collections of poetry about sexuality, childbirth, and the female body with such urgency and care that she’s often credited with changing the shape of contemporary Japanese poetry, i.e. sexing it. “A Poem for Ueno-San” starts with Hiromi Itō noting, “This is when I think of Ueno-san / Her language, her territory, her culture.” Her poetry persistently prods and enacts the process through which language, territory, and culture constitute an individual. Shocking, frank, and revelatory—shocking and frank for nothing but the revelatory—her work reminds me of one of my favorites, Emily Dickinson’s “They shut me up in Prose.” Each of Hiromi’s poems gives us a glimpse of a mind going round and round, a mind incisive, subversive, obsessive, and generous.

Shirley Ancheta: Pinay Poet – Barbara Jane Reyes

I have been an admirer of Watsonville poet Shirley Ancheta for many years. I came to her poems when I was a wee undergrad; she became known to me as one of the formative poets of the Kearny Street Workshop and 1970’s Flips. She’s one of our most talented Filipina poets who have not yet seen publication of a full-length poetry book.

I should provide some context here. In Northern California, the generations of Filipino American poets previous to mine are predominantly male, writing what I read as very masculine narratives. The prevalent theme of the work is the Manongs, which is an Ilocano term for a male elder, possibly a Filipinization of the Spanish “hermano.” The now elderly, surviving Manongs first came to the West Coast in the early twentieth century. They were laborers in agriculture, in fisheries and canneries, in the service industry. They became objects of racial and class violence. They became activists. Some went on to co-found the United Farm Workers. They’ve been quietly erased from American History, despite their labor majorly contributing to the building of California’s economy. Much of the earlier literature of Filipino Americans focused on previous decades’ tumult, and current twilight. This is particularly apt to mention now; as I write this, it’s International Workers’ Day.  

In the 1980’s, Kearny Street Workshop published volumes of poetry, some authored by the descendants of these Manongs, American-born Filipinos, for whom the Philippines was a distant, mythic place. The anthology Without Names, the poetry collection edited by the Bay Area Pilipino American Writers (1985), includes three women among a total of 15 writers. Only one of these women found full-length book publication; this is not Shirley Ancheta. Lucky for us, her poems are anthologized and therefore not forgotten. Within this lengthy context, I present her layered and intensely feminine poetry to you. Her poem, “Stairs,” from Without Names, tells us something of her poetics:

This just in . . . Steve Almond interviews Emma Trelles

For anyone who has ever had a "day job" while still trying to pursue a career as a creative writer, click over to The Nervous Breakdown to read this perceptive and candid interview.  Emma Trelles, who regularly contributes here, is a working journalist and an award winning poet.  She took time to talk about making a living while keeping her poetry alive. 

-- sdh