A long-poem chapbook from the author of Harlot (No Tell Books) and a 2013 NEA Fellow in Poetry. Listen to Jill Alexander Essbaum on the December '09 edition of the Poetry Magazine Podcast. Born in Bay City, Texas, poet and editor Jill Alexander Essbaum was educated at the University of Houston, the University of Texas, and the Episcopal Seminary of the Southwest. Influenced by Edna St. Vincent Millay, Simon Armitage, and Sylvia Plath, Essbaum's poems bring together sex, divinity, and wordplay, blithely working with received forms and displaying a nuanced attention to rhyme and meter. Speaking to this unusual combination of themes in an interview with Eratosphere, Essbaum observed, "Why the pairing of sexual and religious expression seems wrong to our post-modern American ears, I think, is because we're all (no matter what we believe or don't) direct inheritors of a Puritan heritage that disdains human physicality ... in lieu of pursuits of the spirit alone." In a Coldfront review of Necropolis, critic Rick Marlatt noted, "Known for their remarkable mix of eroticism and religiosity, Jill Alexander Essbaum's poems vibrate with well-proportioned rhymes, unforgettable imagery and a unique realization of form."

The Devastation

Literature & Fiction

Essbaum, Jill Alexander

Poetry

Cooper Dillon Books

The Wonderfull Yeare by Nate Pritts ISBN: 978-0-9841928-2-3 Paperback, 67 pages Mary Biddinger, author of Prairie Fever and Saint Monica, says: If the twenty-first century falls victim to a sudden plague, then The Wonderfull Yeare will be its sole antidote. In his collection of pastorals and anti-pastorals, sonnets and anti-sonnets, Pritts proves that the annus mirabilis need not contain monumental breakthroughs like those of Newton and Einstein to justify its wonders. Then isn't to say that these poems lack gravity or electricty, because the opposite is true. With revelations both calamitous and quotidian, Pritts makes us reconsider the entire notion of the calendar, as "Leaves unfold & collect sunlight.//It is the second before everything."

The Wonderfull Yeare (a Shepherd's Calendar)

Pritts, Nate

From Jennifer L. Knox, author of Drunk by Noon &amp; The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway: Some poets take a lot of time mucking up the surface of their poems, turning on the smoke machine, draping silk scarves over the lamps, etc. They don't want to be too clear. The poems in Haunts are crystal clear, but that doesn't help you see what's coming. Every turn is a surprise in this funny, wicked smart, tightly-crafted book. Laura Cherry makes me happy to be a poet. From Adam Clay, author of A Hotel Lobby at the Edge of the World: The "perfect symmetry" of the cars on a bridge - symmetry in Cherry's work occurs not in nature, but in human life. A flock of birds takes off "on schedule" and the speaker thinks of a "luminous plane." Cherry even has the gall to take on the odes (and the ghost) of John Keats. In each reading of this book, a new image or idea catches me. Each time I pick it up, I can't wait to find out what's next.

Haunts

Cherry, Laura

Pretty, Rooster features original comics from Shannon Wheeler (Too Much Coffee Man) and Micah Farritor (White Picket Fences &amp; Night Trippers), with other visual stimulations by Max Xiantu. Jason Schneiderman, author of Striking Surface, writes: You don't read these poems as much as you tumble through them. The pleasures of sound and sense are so perfectly calibrated that each of these sonnets wants to be read at least twice. The sonnet was invented as a vehicle for self-examination, and Matthews takes that literally, driving each one like it had a manual transmission. His discoveries are simultaneously comforting and unsettling, love always inflecting life, and life always inflectiing love.

Pretty, Rooster

Matthews, Clay

A collection to be brought into the quiet clearings, poems from Vine River Hermitage have appeared in Briar Cliff Review, Cave Wall, Guernica, Gulf Stream, Lumina, and Memorious.
Enjoy "At Angles," in Issue 9.5 over at Diagram.
Read the 2008 interview with F. Daniel Rzicznek by Dr. Gary L. McDowell over at Boxcar Poetry.

Vine River Hermitage

Rzicznek, F. Daniel

This Kind of Knowing is built of driven lines where we explore mysterious tensions, "in the cage where the heart paces." From the very beginning, in "Caving," these poems are alive, "like something blooming,/ like something you never imagined/ but realized with surprise/ that you could, actually, love." Thumb through the back issues of Bear River Review. for some of the pieces from This Kind of Knowing.Susannah Sheffer is a staff writer at the national organization Murder Victims’ Families for Human Rights, and also works with teenagers, helping them to understand their lives through writing. In addition to This Kind of Knowing, check out her new nonfiction title,  Fighting for Their Lives: Inside the Experience of Capital Defense Attorneys (Vanderbilt University Press, 2013).

This Kind of Knowing

Sheffer, Susannah

The Book of Mankey’s dramatic narratives tell the story of Les Mankey, a grief-stricken dentist who retreats to a rural cabin and encounters a collector of arcade games, a church busybody, and a girl who talks to a newt. In the legacy of epic poems and the Book of Job, Pierce brings humor, music, and the risk of spirituality to this chapbook, parts of which have been published in New South, Birmingham Poetry Review, Ninth Letter, Relief, and Poet Lore.

The Book of Mankey

Pierce, Richard

From Shannon Tharp: "In Shore, the world begins with 'The things that happen//before the thing/ that is going to happen.' This world's attendant language then moves outward, toward everything and somewhere, much as water and memory do. At the height of its singing, the poem asks, 'Have you grieved, dear Reader?' Within the answer to this question is the sound of water running inside a three, life returning to life, the bottle and the snuff tin, echoes of Emily Dickinson and Memphis Minnie--as though an Alan Lomax field recording has made its way to the page. In this graceful work, Clay Matthews thinks through and sounds out the stories that need telling."
From Steve Davenport: "Listen, the voice says. Once upon a time, there was a story and it was ours and it was made of many voices and it was true and it was never true and it was Clay Matthews' to tell, to sing, to turn into American Long Poem of fish guts and menstrual blood, of motor oil and rising waters, of beautiful umbrella. Where do we come from and where do we go? Better to ask how. Better to listen up and let Clay Matthews' gorgeous, terrible flood song take you back and take you away."

Shore

Transcript is an assemblage of lyrics pointed at domestic anxiety. It wends a way through American myths of familial tranquility and professional stability, while addressing the insularity and isolation that arise from artificial forms of community. While Transcript acknowledges its own melancholy, it also asks the reader to discover beauty in these fractures, reminding us that “[In the silence between words where / only heavy blind-spots exist, / these are love-songs / that live for attention.]”

Transcript

Stutz, Adam

M nica Gomery's Here is the Night and the Night on the Road is here Manuel Paul L pez writes that it's "a vibrant collection populated with lives 'drinking carbon out of the sky.' We confront an environmental logic here where 'each day... is] swabbed in light.' Gomery's poetry consists of ache and wail; outrage and grief; love and tenderness, and most abundantly evident, the immense compassion that this poet delivers in a sweeping, resuscitative vision that honors both life and death." Lillian-Yvonne Bertram says, "In the long tradition of poems about grief, Gomery is a necessary voice. This is an exquisite study in the suddenness of numbered days and the radiant pain of living with love 'tumbling forth.'"

Here is the Night and the Night on the Road

Gomery, Mónica

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