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 »

Warren Hatch’s Mapping the Bones of the World: “An Economy of Grace”

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Anthology Poet Highlight 13/82: Warren (Scott) Hatch, Mapping the Bones of the World Although it might seem contradictory to suggest that Mapping the Bones of the World, a collection of long narrative poems, is economical—as if the poet had composed from a frugal rhetorical budget, determined to compress experience into as tight a linguistic vessel as he could craft in… Read more »

Breaking Bread with Laraine Wilkins: “Make Yourself at Home”

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Anthology Poet Highlight 12/82: Laraine Wilkins: “Make Yourself at Home“ (scroll down)   While Laraine Wilkins has passed on and while I never knew her (though we did share a few brief emails when she was editor of Irreantum: A Review of Mormon Literature and Film and I’d submitted some poems for publication), I believe her impact on the world… Read more »

Finding the Immutable Wayplace of God in Kristen Eliason’s “Arms Upon Arms to an Earth”

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FitP Poet Highlight 11/82: Kristen Eliason, “arms upon arms to an earth“ “Kristen Eliason’s delicious prose and poetry drive a hard bargain between elegy and Japanese wabi-sabi.” So says whoever wrote the bio note on this event page announcing a Kristen Eliason reading at Notre Dame. I nod in agreement: “Yes. Yes, Kristen’s poetry is elegaic, very haiku-like in its… Read more »

“Not Satisfaction, but Its Proxies”: Javen Tanner’s Curses For Your Sake

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Anthology Poet Highlight 10/82: Javen Tanner, Curses For Your Sake “The title of Tanner’s chapbook frames well the experience captured in his lyric narrative poems. Extracted from the decree God directed towards Adam and Eve at the moment he expelled them from the Garden of Eden, the phrase ‘curses for your sake’ (see Gen. 3:17) suggests that moral paradox and… Read more »