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      • Jane Beal
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5/22/2016 0 Comments

Idris Anderson :: Beverly Burch

Donatello got it wrong, stooped her penitent,
whipped to shame, shunned. Worm-eaten wood.
In rags. A sore on her lip.
                                                     I wrote my love
a postcard with a photo of the Magdalene.
I was in love with the heart of the wood, the woman within.
I saw but did not say the truth of it. Here it is. 

                                                 --from
 "A Correction" 

I love how Idris’s work combines high culture and a low country — i.e., coastal South Carolina — sensibility. She writes from a wide-ranging mind and keen intuition, poems that are personal, political, ekphrastic and earthy. In the writing group we share she always has an attuned ear for other poets’ work as well.

  -- Beverly Burch, poet of the week


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5/16/2016 0 Comments

Charlotte Muse :: Priscilla Lee

... She is singing a time
when music was the music of the tongue,
of gourd rattle, whistle, and drum,
of birdsong, water, and the world.

               from "Ascencion Dying" by Charlotte Muse

I was introduced to the poet, Charlotte Muse, in the early 2000s, and I have had the privilege of having her as a mentor for almost two decades now. Her book A Story Also Grows is one of my favorite books of poetry. No one knows better how to delve deeply into the soul to call up stories of great beauty and wisdom and to unfold them into the cosmos than Charlotte. They are extraordinary evocations of the miraculous.

                             -- Priscilla Lee, poet of the week


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4/10/2016 0 Comments

Priscilla Lee :: Cathryn Shea

Maybe they are the spawn
of the serpent who prowled and tempted Eve,
cast into the saltwater.

               from "Beneath the Surface" by Priscilla Lee

I first met Priscilla Lee when I started working at Oracle and we were both technical writers in database engineering. Her book Wishbone is one of my favorites.
One of the things I love about Priscilla's poetry is how rooted in California it is. I love her dark sense of humor.  

​                                -- Cathryn Shea





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3/29/2016 0 Comments

3.29.16:  Melen Lunn :: Wendy Williams

A goddess
floats in mandala dream
hair of sunflowers
doves resting in her hands . . . . 

                  --from The Art 

​Melen Lunn is a Sacramento poet who writes short, power-packed poems rich with imagery and emotion. She was a member of The Writer's Circle group of women poets at the Sacramento Poetry Center. 

                  -- Wendy Williams, poet of the week
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2/22/2016 0 Comments

Cheryl Dumesnil :: Gail Entrekin

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​ Cheryl’s work is immediate, full of the small details of life that make it rich, and artfully-crafted while giving the impression of off-the-cuff spontaneity.  I published a section of her first manuscript in an anthology called Yuba Flows that we were putting out at Hip Pocket Press in 2007, and in 2009 the manuscript as a whole, In Praise of Falling, won the Agnes Starrett Lynch poetry prize and was published in the Pitt Poetry Series.  I was delighted for her, and so pleased that others saw in her poems the same shiny spirit that I enjoy so much. 

We became Christmas-card-and-email friends, showing up at each other’s readings when our books came out, and we have followed each other’s lives and careers ever since.  Her luminous poems continue to please and surprise me (and so many others).  They are warm and funny and alive with intelligence, and I feel she represents some of the very best of her generations’ work.  

-- Gail Entrekin, poet of the week 
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1/10/2016 1 Comment

Merna Dyer Skinner :: Devi Laskar

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“She hangs the gingham apron loose around her neck.  Frayed grosgrain ribbons edge three pockets.  Sewn in her youth and stored in her hope chest, the apron hangs low over breasts heavy as breadfruit.  She pulls wooden clothespins from a pocket.  Bites them between her teeth.  It is laundry day on the prairie.  She hangs her man’s clothes — lets them stiffen on the line.  An errant rooster feather clings to his shirt snapping in the wind…”

​   -- From  “A Brief History of Two Aprons” by Merna Dyer Skinner
 
 Merna Dyer Skinner’s first chapbook A Brief History of Two Aprons (Finishing Line Press) is scheduled for release in March 2016. I cannot wait for the world to read her kick-butt poetry. She is a gifted storyteller and wordsmith. When she isn’t busy working on her poems, Merna helps people overcome their fear of public speaking. Her essays and business articles have appeared in national publications and her poetry in MiOPesias, Star 82 Review, Mojave Review, Silver Birch Press and Squaw Valley Review.


                
                                      -- Devi Laskar, poet of the week 
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1/3/2016 1 Comment

Tracey Knapp :: Melinda Clemmons

 . . . Everyone remembers
the last time you were here,
 
drinking water from the hose.
Back then, you could get away
with knee socks. You could turn
 
a cricket into a field mouse
back then, you were just
that good . . . 
 
                      -- From “Big Deal, Small Town” by Tracey Knapp
 
Tracey Knapp’s first book, Mouth, was published by 42 Miles Press in September 2015. Funny and wise, she gets right down to it. Every poem will surprise you, and you won’t want the pages to end. She can “turn a cricket into a field mouse”… She’s just that good.
 
Tracey’s work has appeared in Best New Poets 2008 and 2010 as well as Five Points, The National Poetry Review, Red Wheelbarrow Review, The New Ohio Review, The Minnesota Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Connotation Press, Painted Bride Quarterly, No Tell Motel, 236, Failbetter, La Petite Zine, Sewanee Theological Review and elsewhere.
​                                             -- Melinda Clemmons, poet of the week

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12/14/2015 1 Comment

12.14.15: Cross Tie: Mari L'Esperance

​What I love most about Mari's L'Esperance's work is not simply that it is lyrical, with stunning imagery, but that she has found a way to write into silence.  Her poetry is both honest, relevant, and deeply spiritual; meaning she somehow writes poems that are both relevant as well as timeless.  
​
Mari is the author of The Darkened Temple, which won the 2007 Prairie Schooner Book Award.  Mari also has co-edited a volume of essays on Philip Levine (Coming Close) with Tomas Morin which was published in 2013 by Prairie Lights Books.

                                   -- Julia Levine, Poet of the Week


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Mari L'Esperance
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12/6/2015 0 Comments

12.6.15: Cross Tie: Nancy Kuhl

Nancy Kuhl is the author of The Wife of the Left Hand, Suspend, and Pine to Sound, all from Shearsman. She's also published several chapbooks and, to my mind, understands the possibilities of that book form as well as any poet. Her poetry often examines the lives of women, from her own to Amelia Earhart to Hildegard of Bingen. Her attention to language and to detail, her deft choice of image, the grappling with ideas through sound as well as meaning--all of it draws me in. Here are a few lines from "Pyramid," a poem about various ways a person might fall:

Doesn’t it please you, their aesthetic collapse,
how, for a moment, they flutter like dandelion seeds?
The top-most girl falls

often—from curbs, over tree--
roots, almost anything might send her.

Nancy is also the Curator of Poetry for the the Beinecke Library's Collection of American Literature. In that role, she has written several exhibition catalogs, including Intimate Circles: American Women in the Arts, which I'm incredibly happy to have on my shelf and go back to regularly. Her work--her own poetry and also the conversations she fosters through her work as a curator and librarian--shapes contemporary poetry in wonderful ways.

             -- Anna Leahy
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11/22/2015 1 Comment

11.22.15: Sonia Greenfield

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​I encountered Sonia Greenfield for the first time at a reading of ekphrastic poems that I participated in at the Riverside Art Museum last August.  I was bowled over by her “Nafsicrate Considers Bruegel’s Famous Work”:

I told Daedalus to watch him, goddammit,
so now here I am waiting for my son
 to breaststroke home to me, held up on fingers
of green foam. Waiting past the rise and fall
of Rome through to Pieter’s brushwork
which rendered the sun like a lemon on fire . . . . 

I loved the point of view in this poem, the implicit war between the parents, the portrait of infinite, focused and pragmatic mother-love which maintains even self-deceiving hope. And I promptly bought Sonia Greenfield's first book, Boy with a Halo at the Farmer's Market, winner of the 2014 Codhill Poetry Award. Greenfield's fierce and witty work is highly inventive, and often other-directed, as in the title poem, which imagines the later life of this boy with a "metal halo" "bolted into his skull"—a life in which a broken neck turns out to have been "a lucky break." She re-invents myth, again, in "Afternoon with Redón," another ekphrastic poem, in which Galatea is not the victim of Polyphemus, but "like the heartbreaker, / the boy-teaser, the self-pleaser / who only thought to have some fun," and he "like a monster-hearted boy before he buys / his gun." In "Milk Carton Kids," she invents the places and ways children can disappear forever, not even to be found "stuffed / in a trunk" or "dragged from a lake." She asks how "thoughts and prayers go out" in response to a disaster ("Like a loon's / song transmitted by Morse?"), as when "the first plane hit" in 2001. Her metaphors and similes are fresh and exact. "At night bugs came out / and flicked their shells open // like switchblades." ("Pestilence"). They are also compressed, deft, and unsentimental; in “Sago Mine, West Virginia”—about the explosion that killed twelve of thirteen miners—the coal is described as “a black ribbon pinned to / a lapel.”

Greenfield's is often a dire, threatening world seen with a cold, clear eye, a world in which "schools are ever on lockdown behind / chain-link where the mothers cling" ("School Rules"), yet there can be sly amusement in her clear-eyed inventiveness. In "A Vision in Stride Rite," the baby throws his sandal out of the pram, and eats champagne grapes "as he surveys his subjects." The narrator (echoing Allen Ginsberg?), concludes:

                                    Here he is,
Baby Bacchus, making the most
of privilege as his servant
puts her shoulder to the wheel
and shoves on
up the hill.

I admire the strategies of so many of these poems, the way the poet manages their "plots,” or turns them multiple times. In "Morning Coffee with Chagall," she describes a Chagall painting on a coffee cup, a painting in which

The bride and groom lift off
as if their feet were filled with helium, a bouquet of peonies
in her hands, lips locked as if they're
inflating each other like elegant balloons . . . 

The poem only turns neatly toward the self in the third line from the end, when the pronoun "my" deftly enters:  

                           Held aloft, alive--
before their feet touch the ground, before dishes
need to be done. Before the cup is drained, rinsed
and shut away in the hot spray of my top-of-the-line
machine, caught flying before the gravity
of domestic routine.

I look forward to further work from the accomplished Sonia Greenfield.

-- Judy Kronenfeld

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