Publications & Achievements
“I Remember Her Hair” & The Prompt That Led Me Here
Happy Wednesday, everyone! I hope you're all enjoying your week. I'm doing things a little differently this week, writing poems every day, but in a mix of free-writing and prompted writing. Here is my poem for today, and the prompt that inspired it. Thanks for...
“Where It’s Gone” & The Prompt Behind It
Hi everyone! Happy Tuesday! I'm doing things a little differently starting this week, sharing a poem and the writing prompt behind it (I'm back to writing poems each day, some written free-style, and some by prompt). I know I'm a little late to the party today,...
“All My Things Are Empty Now” & The Prompt That Wrote It
Hello, everyone! I hope you had a nice weekend and are enjoying your Monday. Starting this week, I'm going to do something a little different. I'm back to writing every day, with a mixture of free-writing and prompt-driven writing. I'm going to share a poem...
What Growing Up Tastes Like
--A poem today after a long hiatus ---Happy International Day of the...
Reading at LangLab Tonight! & Poem Featured as Creative Writing Prompt
Hi everyone! I hope you're all enjoying your week. Two pieces of fun news for this afternoon--- I'll be reading tonight among friends at LangLab in South Bend at 7pm as a part of Lit Literary Collective's WRITE NIGHT with Ultreia, Inc. You can find more about...
A Walk in the Snow
When we were younger, we leveled footprints in the woods---off the path, of course, down deep where the sun could barely find us, where we blended with the trees and hid behind the shrubbery. I found a deer, small, its eyes glazed and wide, still hiding from...
My Dumb Heart
---To my fellow Benders, I threw on my grief. MY DUMB HEART is open wide and overflows with water. How I manage to stay alive is beyond me. I like to...
Dear Emily—
---Hope is the thing with feathers. Here is a truth: I thrive on hope. But yet, here is another: if you fill a pillow with feathers, I cannot sleep--- I wake in the middle of the night, heavy-chested and warm, throwing off the dark as if it were a spare...
Poem of the Day & Reading Posts
Poem of the Day: Kim Addonizio
DARKENING, THEN BRIGHTENING The sky keeps lying to the farmhouse, lining up its heavy clouds above the blue table umbrella, then launching them over the river. And the day feels hopeless until it notices a few trees dropping delicately their white petals...
Poem of the Day: Kim Dower
HE SAID I WROTE ABOUT DEATH and I didn’t mean to, this was not my intent. I meant to say how I loved the birds, how watching them lift off the branches, hearing their song helps me get through the gray morning. When I wrote about how they crash into the...
(I’m Back) Poem of the Day: Jack Gilbert
Hi everyone! I know it's been a while again. But here I am: quiet little me, doing quiet not-so-little things. I'm in the process of starting a small feature series called The Curve with Write around the Bend, in preparation for their literary magazine launch...
Poem of the Day: John Ashbery
AT NORTH FARM Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you, At incredible speed, traveling day and night, Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes. But will he know where to find you, Recognize you when he sees...
Poem of the Day: Julie Bruck
---after Philip Larkin TO BRING THE HORSE HOME Is all I’ve wanted past wanting since I was six and delirious with fever, an infinitive forged from a...
Poem of the Day: Danez Smith
not an elegy for Mike Brown I am sick of writing this poem but bring the boy. his new name his same old body. ordinary, black dead thing. bring him & we will mourn until we forget what we are mourning & isn’t that what being black is about? not the joy...
Poem of the Day: Franz Wright
---in the wake of another tragedy: praying for France THOUGHTS OF A SOLITARY FARMHOUSE And not to feel bad about dying. Not to take it so personally---...
Poem of the Day: Elizabeth Bradfield
PURSUIT ---for Arctic Explorer Donald B. MacMillan...
Book Reviews & Author Interviews
The Power of Grief, The Power of Hallucination, The Power of YA Literature: Reading Rebekah Crane’s Aspen
Let me point one fact out from the beginning: I admire young adult literature, and I believe it can be extremely powerful when the central characters are confident, self-possessed individuals, dealing with both personal and more widely-recognized issues....
Preparing the Way for My Daughter: Reading Lori Day’s Her Next Chapter
Upon reading Lori Day’s Her Next Chapter: How Mother-Daughter Book Clubs Can Help Girls Navigate Malicious Media, Risky Relationships, Girl Gossip, and So Much More, I am completely floored with possibilities. Her Next Chapter, at first glance, may be meant as...
The Spectrum of Mood & Mind: Reading Kyle Muntz’s Green Lights
Dreamscape; Existentialism; Echoes of Religion and Tradition---these, among others, represent the themes that are presented to us, and challenge us, in the reading of Kyle Muntz’s Green Lights, a novella structured within a surrealist neighborhood that responds...
Looking Back: Lessons in Complacency Taken from Frank Stanford and Dean Young
THE SINGING KNIVES The dogs woke me up I looked out the window Jimmy ran down the road With the knife in his mouth He was naked And the moon Was a dead man floating down the river He jumped on the Gypsy’s pony He rode through camp I could see the dust...
“Silence, silence…which is in me / like a hill”: Lessons to be taken from Robert Creeley
Admittedly, whenever I sit down to read “one of the greats” for the first time, my inner-skeptic finds her way out and asks, “What’s with all the hype?” I ask this question not for the sake of propelling myself forward, or of devaluing late-writers, but for the...
KabbaLoom: Reading Lisa Fishman
Upon first impression, Lisa Fishman’s Flower Cart may appear to be somewhat inaccessible and scattered, due to its intellectual leaps, orientation-variations (horizontal and vertical) and multimedia-feel insertions. However, through further exploration, the...
Horses, Etc.: The Kinesthetic Nature of Marni Ludwig’s Pinwheel
Typically when I read a poetry collection that is more surreal in nature, I eventually reach some level of disappointment, simply for the reason that the collection lacks a form of balance between the concrete and the surreal. In Marni Ludwig’s collection,...
Midnight in Paris
I just might have to go back and see this again and write a review of it. I wanted nothing more than my typewriter and to stay up to write all night after I saw this.
Past Literary Events
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