Featured Poet
James Arthur was born in Connecticut and grew up in Toronto. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Poetry, Brick, Ploughshares, and The American Poetry Review. He has received the Amy Lowell Travelling Poetry Scholarship, a Stegner Fellowship, a Discovery/The Nation Prize, The Fiddlehead’s Ralph Gustafson Prize, and a residency at the Amy Clampitt House. He is currently a Hodder Fellow at the Lewis Center for the Arts in Princeton. His first book, Charms Against Lightning, is available through Copper Canyon Press: www.coppercanyonpress.org
Archives
McCartney, Sharon
Matuk, Nyla
Surani, Moez
Murakami, Sachiko
Besner, Linda
Graham, Catherine
Bloom, Ronna
Bowling, Tim
Neilson, Shane
Newlove, John
Pool, Sandy
Robinson, Matt
Schmidt, Brenda
Thornton, Russell
Vermeersch, Paul
Williams, Julia
Featured Interview
Johanna Skibsrud
Interviewed by Alessandro Porco
So, I'd like to start with a comment made near the end of your Late Nights with Wild Cowboys, in the poem "Jawbone." You express real fear and anxiety over the prospect of having your life and love be objectified, turned into summary, a bowdlerized rendering that "[leaves] nearly everything out." More than that, though, you are worried about how we ourselves are complicit in this sort of exclusionary act. I guess what I'd like to ask first, then, is: do you imagine poetry as a means of letting things in rather than keeping everything out? And what are you aiming to let in, exactly?
I really do think of poetry in that way, in terms of providing a space -- an opening -- in which it might be possible to say the things that are hard, and perhaps impossible, to say otherwise; in which to express that inarticulate feeling that you get sometimes...continue reading
Featured Review
The Good News About Armageddon
By Steve McOrmond
Steve McOrmond's new collection of poems begins with a caution. In the style of TV content warnings, "Advisory" lists potential disturbing content to come: "themes which could threaten the viewer's sense of security," "Evidence of fatalism and irreligion," and the typical forewarnings about sexuality, violence and "language." Here McOrmond displays the dual cautionary and playful perspectives that interact throughout the book, switching from warnings about a drowning and an animal attack to the line, "The following program may contain scenes not suitable for language."
The poem raises the expected questions about what we censor and screen in popular media. What is considered objectionable, and why? Placed at the start of a collection whose title references Armageddon, "Advisory" leads the reader to expect a certain discomfort.
With that warning, the book moves to the title...continue reading