Happy News! I’m pleased to announce my poetry review of Angela Voras-Hills’ LOUDER BIRDS from Pleiades Press, 2020, is now live at Green Mountains Review!… Read More My Review of Angela Voras-Hills’ LOUDER BIRDS is Now Live at Green Mountains Review!
My interview with Shaindel Beers, hosted by The Rumpus, is here! It features thoughts on Shaindel’s writing process, SECURE YOUR OWN MASK, nature and violence, and our mutual experiences of the Midwest and motherhood. Enjoy!… Read More An Interview with Shaindel Beers!
Here is my complete book review of Shaindel Beers’ SECURE YOUR OWN MASK, from White Pine Press (2018). Enjoy!… Read More The (Im)Precision of Language, Nature, & Violence: Reading Shaindel Beers’ Secure Your Own Mask
The thing that I love about erasure poetry is how interactive it can (and should!) be with the original work it is pulling from. I think, for some writers who attempt this form, the goal is to reinvent the words that are on the page, than to accept them and attempt to draw something… Read More “My Face Resembles / The One Reflected in the Water”: Reading David Dodd Lee’s And Others, Vaguer Presences
David Dodd Lee has been there with me since the beginning—not since the beginning of my reading and loving poetry, but of my writing poetry and taking that progress seriously. Of taking poetry seriously, and the idea that there was something to be taken from poetry, to be understood, to be had. Like a… Read More “Black Light / Her Name in a Cup”: Scenes & Impressions: Reading David Dodd Lee’s Animalities
I don’t know about you, but in my mind, perception and grief are united. This is not to say that one cannot exist without the other, but only that our perceptions vary based on our state of mind—especially when we are talking about grief. On an average, typical day, we know very well that… Read More ‘This is Not a Pipe’: The Powers of Nature & Grief over Perception & Definition: Reading Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude
Sometimes I find myself thinking so much about what poetry is or what it can do that I forget to think about how it can make me feel. Perhaps that is the sign of a lesser poetry, a poetry with holes in it: one that goes through the motions, the mechanics, of writing, but… Read More Dialogue of the Body, Dialogue of a Storm: Reading Sandra Marchetti’s Confluence
Let me begin by playing a round of Two Truths and a Lie… We all know how this works, right? The speaker shares two truths about themselves, and a lie, but the lie must not be easily distinguished from the two truths, and the other players are supposed to guess which statement is a… Read More “Look Where That Has Gotten Me”: The Potential Self-Awareness & Honesty of Poetry: Reading Tracey Knapp’s Mouth
Do you ever find yourself in a reading slump? Or too unreasonably busy to even consider finding a way to fit reading in? And when you finally do have the time and energy, do you find yourself searching for that writing style that just throws you back in, every time? Well, this summer, as… Read More The Rhythm of Reading & Hearing Poetry: Reading Three Beautiful Collections by Susan Lewis
In the quiet moments, when we stop to take a breath and think, we may realize that all of our thoughts, our questions, our hopes, are connected—that is to say, back to two main ideas: Where am I going? and Where have I been? Again, as if to say something toward longevity, What am… Read More “The Way Poetry Evokes Things / Only Potentially There”: Perception, Identity & Heritage: Reading Allan Peterson’s Precarious
When we spend a lot of time reading poetry, I know we can become critical of the pursuit of love and the defining of boundaries in poetry—but sometimes, a poet chooses to address these exact topics, and they get everything right: they create something new, something meaningful, something entirely worth reading, whether it is… Read More The Waking, Danger & Consent of the Body & Love: Reading Lisa Mangini’s Bird Watching at the End of the World
Here I am, attempting to think of what to say, but my coffee spilled, and it made such a lovely and dark display across my table. This is the sort of mindset in which Shawnte Orion places me: an area of in-the-moment appreciation, the odd humor of something spilled and its preoccupation with gaining… Read More Clark Kent is a Super Hipster: The Art of Finding Beauty in the Absurd & the Mundane: Reading Shawnte Orion’s The Existentialist Cookbook
