Organized into ten sections with each devoted to a poetic concept, The Practicing Poet begins with "Discovering New Material," "Finding the Best Words," "Making Music," "Working with Sentences and Line Breaks," "Crafting Surprise," and "Achieving Tone." The concepts become progressively more sophisticated, moving on to "Dealing with Feelings," "Transforming Your Poems," and "Rethinking and Revising." The final section, "Publishing Your Book," covers manuscript organization, book promotion, and presentation of a good public reading.The book includes thirty brief craft essays, each followed by a model poem and analysis of the poem's craft, then a prompt based on the poem. Ten recyclable bonus prompts are also included. Ten Top Tips lists are each loaded with poetry wisdom from an accomplished poet The Practicing Poet pushes poets beyond the basics and encourages the continued reading, learning, and writing of poetry. It is suitable as a textbook in the classroom, a guidebook in a workshop, or an at-home tutorial for the practicing poet working independently. The craft essays, poems, and top tips lists include the work of 113 contemporary poets.
Allusive, mystical, and deeply felt, J.L. Conrad's A World in Which calls to mind Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus. Her lyricism is impeccable, her imagination radical. Open houses, carpool lines, married life, pet care, and election days barely conceal the dystopian of scarab infestations, environmental illness, mass surveillance, biblical floods, and meteor showers. Granted communion with their beloved dead, the living persevere despite the "approaching hoofbeats" of the Apocalypse. As these visionary poems avow, "It falls to us to shovel dirt over the flames." -Carolyn Hembree, For Today
The very cool "My Chili Recipe: An Ars Poetica" includes an actual chili recipe as well as advice that's excellent for chili and poetry: stir occasionally. A good poem requires a kind of mixing or churning, a change (or changes) in direction, in tone or feeling, if it's to offer anything new or worthwhile, and imagination is always the source of the stir. What I find so pleasurable about Tom C. Hunley's poems is the multifaceted nature of his imagination, whether conceptual, ethical, sonic, emotional, or imagistic. I had faith in this book from the first few pages, both that the poems would have something to offer, something to say, and that I wouldn't be able to predict what that was. That's the way it is with the best cooks-they deliver the goods, but you don't know how. -Bob Hicok, Water Look Away
In beautifully lyrical language, Heather Swan evokes both the broken human world of self-inflicted damage (pesticides, herbicides, "the noise of industry and ego") and the healing natural world of replenishment and repair (rock, bird, water, animal, plant, air). If, for Swan, the human body is "a desert drilled for petroleum," "a trout stream dying," "a splinter pulled from a tree," it is also "an astral body," "a celestial body," "a body of light." Whether lamenting the death of a beloved father or the loss of an endangered species; meditating speculatively on the post-apocalyptic thoughts of Noah's wife; riffing on the likes of Kermit the Frog, Wile E. Coyote, or Piglet and Winnie the Pooh; or simply delighting in the freshness and vividness of experience, Swan illuminates the depths of our daily lives. For a reader, gifted with such honest, clear-eyed, evocative and restorative poems as these, there is "Nothing left to say but,/ thank you./ Thank you." -Ron Wallace, For a Limited Time Only
In Saba Husain's Elegy for My Tongue, the everyday is always in conversation with the enormous-with the complexities of immigration, national identity, mortality, language and faith. The simplicity of a grandmother helping her grandson study for a test becomes a meditation on family history, discovering how "paper remembers a steaming cup of black tea/ with cardamom and milk, / and the glide of a fountain pen." Or a clothesline whipping in the wind, "flinging clothes stiff from the sun/ into the air like/ mammoth butterflies," leads to the knowledge of the private self within the enormity of family and history, the self that almost wants to be revealed. This book spans nations and languages, generations, and the tiniest moments of insight and discovery. Saba Husain writes with musical intelligence, with grace and clarity that seem almost effortless. This is a terrific book, one that I will return to with pleasure. - Kevin Prufer, The Fears
Helena Mesa's Where Land Is Indistinguishable from Sea takes readers on a profound journey of self-discovery, personal growth, and transformation in the aftermath of grief. The poems in the collection address the risk of forgetting, recognizing the darkness that threatens to consume anything lost. Despite this uncertainty, the poems remind us that we are a sanctuary of memories, begging to be loved and cherished, even if we must eventually let go. Mesa confronts a world that is constantly divided. Masterfully composed, these poems are full of light, radiating with a "wild joy," for the living that longs to shine and be remembered. -Ruben Quesada, Revelations
"Why remember the dead?" poet Kathy Nelson begins this sobering meditation, a descent and rise through what's lost and sometimes found again, her keen eye on the natural world, her mother in the Bardo and in life, both trouble and love restored, unshakable grief, regret, triumph, mystery... And why exactly? Because we need these poems as lens, as touchstone. And such lovely, startling interventions of language and image! Vivid detail, layer upon layer-say, a "landscape stitched with fencerows," or to hold a breath "until someone unlocks the door." That someone is this most remarkable poet. "Last night," Nelson writes, "I found a hidden stairway leading down/into a maze of rooms ..." And what a rewarding gift for all of us, to follow her there. -Marianne Boruch, Bestiary Dark
In the compassionate, playful, fable-like poems of The Animals of My Earth School, Mildred Kiconco Barya awakens us to the vividly singing, fully alive, non-human communities surrounding us. These poems demonstrate poetry's unique ability to prick us from our self-involved numbness and awaken us to wonder. There is great solace, tenderness, and innocence here-the kind of innocence capable of apprehending the creatures of the world-and thus the world itself-afresh. Like a literary Noah's ark of song, The Animals of My Earth School provides a place where all may dance and thrive. These poems provide pleasure and a glimmer of hope. -Michael Hettich, The Mica Mine
Rachel Custer's Flatback Sally Country is hard-hitting and harrowing and almost hypnotically beautiful in its deft singing of the stories of America's vast middle, of the flyover land pinned beneath the derision of coastal elites. Personas like Tommy Two Fingers, Old Maid, and Flatback Sally herself tell us of lives "lived alone behind / the turned back of the world," nursing "the desperate shame // of broken teeth, of ugliness / that can't afford disguise." Think holler; think burnt-out, spit-out coal town; think meth; think whole communities sunk into the grave-deep rut of poverty. Violence is done in this book, to factory workers' bodies "feeding [them]selves in pieces to machines" to keep America's shelves stocked, and to women, especially those kinds of women, like Sally, so often hooked and gutted by men's wants and needs. Flatback Sally Country is a timely, vitally important book by one of the most gifted young poets writing today. -Francesca Bell, What Small Sound
Nicole Callihan's semantic debates and whimsical linguistics in This Strange Garment open the reader to more than the pain, treatment, and aftermath of breast cancer. We also get the "god in the scars." Hers is a mind of lyrical curiosity, turning life around and finding prisms. Let her show you how to "place lady slipper orchids where your flesh used to be." Let these poems pull you into a life "severed but raptured." ¿ -Lauren Camp, 2022-2025 New Mexico Poet Laureate
In this extraordinary collection, Ann Fisher-Wirth looks levelly at mortality, grief, and memory, and reckons with what it is to be urgently alive, bringing her incisive nuance to subjects ranging from the loss of a beloved sister to Mississippi's Parchman Penitentiary to our imperiled natural world to the comforts of marital love. In "Wooden Comb," Fisher-Wirth writes, "I cannot reconcile how the world is sweet, how the world is burning." Paradise Is Jagged is too wise a book to promise impossible reconciliation. Instead it offers a benediction of sorts: Walk with me through this difficult and tender place, it says. Willingly, gratefully, we do. -Catherine Pierce, Danger Days, 2021-2025 Mississippi Poet Laureate
This beautiful and fraught book is born from a closely observed life, one rich in compassion for the natural and human worlds, for the blessings and violences we do to one another. Beneath the details is a yearning that we'll learn to care for each other more, that we'll see the life-giving connections that always surround us. LeBlanc is a poet whose pen can offer the quiet light of the moon to guide us. -Todd Davis
Kirsten Shu-ying Chen's searing debut collection offers a poignant exploration of the liminal space between what is holy and what is prosaic. Formalistically rich and varied, these poems do not blink in the face of grief, but shelter there. Chen "curse[s] the wide width of the wound" and creates a world in which her poems link arms to enter the blistering present. A demonstration of the daily rituals of love, these elegies swell with humanity as death draws near. "The body knows. / The night knows and the body listens." Light waves simultaneously reminds us of what we already know and what we too often forget: there just isn't enough time, and yet, an abundance of joy is everywhere, for each of us.-Omotara James, Song of My Softening
Horse Not Zebra, we learn in the title poem of this collection, refers to advice given to medical students-to look first to "the common, not the exotic" when diagnosing patients. Eric Nelson embraces that advice in his poems, exploring the common rituals of daily life-family interactions, gardening, long walks with or without dogs, even the clomp of a neighbor's boots can be, for him, a call to attention. He acknowledges the darker moments of history he has lived through and faces intimations of his own mortality, yet persists in doing the hard work of learning how to laugh. His poems invite us to find joy in the quotidian and a way to "sing ourselves beyond ourselves." -Grace Bauer
These poems touch, caress, ponder, and probe myriad facets of the world's body, that tangible, earthy presence that sustains and enlivens us. A daughter in her fashion of all-encompassing Walt, Theresa Burns revels in the whole of the tuneful yet muddy yet encouraging yet saddening drama, the great participial thrust Walt was so keen on-living. Carefully wrought, each poem has that this-is-a-leaf-from-the-earth feel, a fullness of feeling that is explicit and-to use one of the poet's words-evergreen.-Baron Wormser, Songs from a Voice
The poems in House Bird drill deep beneath the surface of domestic life, finding the essential truth in the tension between what gets said and what goes unsaid, exploring the consequences of speaking and the consequences of remaining silent. Fillman reveals how vulnerable we are, even in our own bedrooms, basements, driveways. Like in the Hopper and Wyeth paintings that inspire some of his poems, he finds the mood between desire and loneliness, that feeling so profound and universal that we can only bow our heads in recognition. A remarkable debut by a promising young poet.-Jim Daniels
The Strategic Poet: Honing the Craft focuses on the craft of poetry and is based on the belief that craft can be taught and the best teacher of craft is a good poem.
David Axelrod writes achingly beautiful poems on the growing shadow of climate collapse. His lamentations address our refusal to turn away from the insatiable desire for consumption and material wealth, asking, "Aren't we the fire front, gnawing through dry scrub?" Yet this collection, as it brings us into the intimacy of earth's memory and its survivors reveals the many ways we might learn to praise the abundant sacredness of the greater-than-human world. Like the prophets of old who cried out in the wilderness, Axelrod offers possible visions of healing for "a future world / where a young aspen grove // yields back all of summer's light into air." -Todd Davis, Native Species
In The Poet & The Architect, Christine Stewart-Nunez explores how the disciplines we devote our lives to influence how we view the world and, subsequently, interact with each other. If, as Louis Sullivan says in the book's epigraph, an architect must possess "e;the intuition of a poet,"e; the poet/speaker in this collection must also learn to construct her own body of work "e;using the material / one has."e; That material includes the relationship the poet and the architect build from their pasts and the blended family they create and nurture together. "e;My husband writes shelter,"e; Stewart-Nunez says, "e;I architect spells."e; They are spells she invites us to enter and take shelter in.-Grace Bauer
Ewing's poems bear witness to the ephemeral-as a way to wonder and to make monument out of fleeting moments of beauty in the natural world, or fleeting connections between people.
A gorgeously deft book, The Curator's Notes dares to question the Edenic. It asks, why not take the knowledge at hand hanging like "e;plump, purple orbs...begging to be eaten..."e;? And what can we grow with states of paradise being ever fleeting? This curator is a custodian of both specific and collective heritage, connecting daughter to mother to grandmother to wife to husband to the backyard garden to that garden of old where, as in the womb, knowing is limited and inevitable. In her sensual and tender book, Robin Rosen Chang has taken care to graciously offer us lyrics that swirl around and beyond our expectations until we accept both the churning waters and the radiant flight of circling birds as part of the story of life moving all too swiftly with and ultimately toward "e;the loam -/sand, silt, and clay."e; -Vievee Francis
"e;Mad fury all around"e;-somehow the right words about life make it easier to get on with it. These poems do exactly that, catching us out in the most adroit, surprising ways: by sheer skill, self-aware intellect, a mordant wit, abundant heart, a gift for metaphor so exact it produces combustible insights of complex truth. These poems brilliantly enact our contradictory nature, its poles, and they compel us to look within. -Eleanor Wilner
Emily Franklin''s Tell Me How You Got Here is rich with the objects of this world-a stray sneaker on the highway, a garage-sale skillet, "damp frogs small as grapes"-ordinary things and situations revealed as extraordinary, thanks to her original vision and precise language. That most overworked and least understood muscle, the human heart, is the great filter through which these objects pass and accrue their startling beauty. At the end of the book, Franklin returns us to the world, and returns the world to us, redeemed. What more could we ask for from poetry?-Beth Ann Fennelly, Poet Laureate of Mississippi, 2016-2020
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