Tag Archives: language

But We are No Eden: Emily Stanfill’s “Then I Became Eve”

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Poet Highlight: Emily Stanfill, “Then I Became Eve“ What strikes me most about the poem, first, is the way the poet “verbs” the adjective innocent, using it not to describe her Eve—as in, “I am/was innocent/an innocent person”—but as a means of modifying her, as in, “He made me innocent.” This out-of-the-ordinary usage highlights, for me, the possibility of Adam… Read more »

Language—and Beyond Language: Lisa Bickmore’s “Dog Aria”

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Anthology Poet Highlight 23/82: Lisa Bickmore, “Dog Aria” Lisa’s poem is about a dog. And not about a dog. On the surface the poet narrates her dachsund’s relationship with water and with song, showing the canine “baying adagio,” swimming “among the staves”—the movements of the sprinklers, the dishwasher, the washing machine—as the hush of water grows thick in his ears… 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 »

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 »

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 »

The Deep-throated Ache of Marilyn Bushman Carlton’s “Violin Concerto No. 5 in A Major“

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Anthology Poet Highlight 5/82: Marilyn Bushman-Carlton, “Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5 in A Major“ (Here’s a link to my reading of Marilyn’s poem.) Music, as poetry, has power to bind us through and with the body’s rhythms. Marilyn Bushman-Carlton provides a case in point with “Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5 in A Major,” a fairly short poem that shows the… Read more »