Who is Melissa Kwasny? How is it that I hadn’t known of her before this? How did she come to write this startling book? Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today, the 2017 entry in the Pacific Northwest Poetry series, simply blows me away. It’s perhaps a tough sell to a general audience, but […]
Okay, okay, I said I’d read a poetry book every day in April and report here. But the only book I read today (and that, rather obsessively) was my own manuscript of poems, which I told my editor I would send to him. Today. It still isn’t where I want it to be, but I’m […]
Just the title alone would be enough to make this book resonate with me. But it’s also by Linda Pastan, who wrote “An Early Afterlife,” and — so far as I’m concerned — could have retired after that and still stayed at the top of my list. Instead, we have Insomnia (Norton, 2015). As Pastan grows older […]
This morning I reread the poems in Love Is Not Enough by Irish academic and poet Maurice Harmon (given name pronounced “Morris”). The book was published in 2010 on the occasion of Harmon’s 80th birthday and includes selections from his earlier books, including The Last Regatta, and The Mischievous Boy. On my recent visit to Ireland I was privileged to meet Professor […]