Category Archives: Poet Highlights

“The Points at which My Loves Fell from Me”: Philip White’s The Clearing

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Anthology Poet Highlight 22/82: Philip White, The Clearing In this book dedicated to his late father, mother, and wife, Philip invites us to feel our way around in the soul-space excavated by love and life, loss and death. Framed, then, as elegiac meditations on the loss of persons beloved, the poet lingers on these moments of departure—what the speaker in… Read more »

Contemplating the Sharpness of God’s Gaze: Marie Brian’s “Spindrift”

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Anthology Poet Highlight 21/82: Marie Brian, “Spindrift“ When I first read “Spindrift,” it caught me off-guard. The first thing that struck me first about the poem is its (Emily) Dickinsonian style: seemingly random, mid-sentence capitalizations, the hyphens, the brevity. The tone, however, is a bit more hopeful, more reverent as the poet’s mind reaches through the sea spray, contemplating redemption,… Read more »

Alex Caldiero’s “Seeing a Body”: The Shape Sound Makes

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Anthology Poet Highlight 20/82: Alex Caldiero, “Seeing a Body” This poem, which I’ve taken to calling “Seeing a Body” for ease of reference, melds performance and content in order to compel an awareness of the body’s connection to the earth and to language and sound—even to compel an awareness of the body’s connection to the earth and to tradition through… Read more »

We Shall Not Cease: Darlene Young’s “How Long”

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Anthology Poet Highlight 19/82: Darlene Young, “How Long“ Humanity’s stories are often filled with desire for something more, with homesickness, a wanderlust that leads characters to leave home and to enter the wilderness—whether physical, psychological, or emotional—in search of true belonging, something they’re never quite able to find. This yearning and its subsequent lack of fulfillment are illustrated well by… Read more »

Fleshing Out a Sublime Flatness: Willie DeFord’s “St. Teresa of Avila as Middle Manager”

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Anthology Poet Highlight 18/82: William DeFord, “St. Teresa of Avila as Middle Manager” [audio:http://fireinthepasture.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/tumblr_lu3wg4OFMa1qldxkx.mp3] This is me, reading and briefly commenting on Willie’s poem the day I broke Fire in the Pasture on the world. Willie is Sally’s beau. They live and write and play music together somewhere in Colorado. And, coincidentally (or not), they’re both poets and both included… Read more »

Sally Stratford’s “Inheritance”: What Holds Us Together

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Anthology Poet Highlight 17/82: Sally Stratford, “Inheritance“ The most striking thing to me about this poem are the images that suggest being clothed/covered/dressed in one’s legacy; or, in the poet’s words, that imply “wear[ing a] name” (line 1) that’s been passed between generations. There’s the “two carat diamond / which, like a heavy rock of salt, / falls to the… Read more »

An “Evening Drive” through the Nature of Language with Patricia Karamesines

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Anthology Poet Highlight 16/82: Patricia Karamesines, “Evening Drive“ The lyric quality of “Evening Drive” pulls me into the narrative, placing me in the (rhetorical) vehicle beside the poet and her companion as they drive down a springing lane, both traversing the same landscape, through seeing it through different eyes. Such is the nature of language—and the language of nature, for… Read more »

“A Delicious Lapping”: Lance Larsen’s In All Their Animal Brilliance

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Anthology Poet Highlight 15/82: Lance Larsen, In All Their Animal Brilliance American poet Lola Haskins blurbed about Lance’s second collection that “the book stands out” in the field of contemporary American poetry for at least two reasons: first, because “it travels—from a talisman in the first poem to a vineyard in the last, in which metaphors of growth and renewal… Read more »

On Deja Earley Playing “Housewife for Halloween”

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Anthology Poet Highlight 14/82: Deja Earley, “Housewife for Halloween“ Deja has published a number of poems on the web (see here, here, and here for starters). But I thought “Housewife for Halloween” was an appropriate choice for the day. I like it 1) for its brevity–it’s only four lines long–and 2) because it made me laugh, especially as I consider… Read more »

Kimberly Johnson’s Ode To a Woman’s “Most Matronly Adornment”

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Poet Highlight: Kimberly Johnson, “Ode on My Episiotomy“ Yep. That’s right. Episiotomy. A woman’s “most matronly adornment,” as Kim has it. What better reason, then, to write an “Ode on My Episiotomy.” (Not that I have one—not that I’ll ever have one, unless, like I ruminate here, I can slip on my wife’s. Not likely though.) I adore this poem—as… Read more »