Tag Archive for: Sarah Manguso

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Your Job

November 27, 2016/0 Comments/in Uncategorized, Writing /by Bethany

“The purpose of being a serious writer is not to express oneself, and it is not to make something beautiful, though one might do those things anyway. Those things are beside the point. The purpose of being a serious writer is to keep people from despair. If you keep that in your mind always, the wish to make something beautiful or smart looks slight and vain in comparison. If people read your work and, as a result, choose life, then you are doing your job.” –Sarah Manguso

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Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of MindfulnessApril 15, 2024 - 10:36 pm
Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems, eds. Phyllis Cole-Dai, Ruby R. Wilson, Grayson Books, West Hartford, CT, 2017, 250 pages, $21.95, paper, www.GraysonBooks.com. I am hard at work (or joyfully at work) on my spring class with the Creative Retirement Institute (CRI), “Good Poetry for Hard Times,” and I am also working on several […]
Choosing to be Simple: Collected Poems of Tao YuanmingApril 9, 2024 - 9:14 pm
CHOOSING TO BE SIMPLE: COLLECTED POEMS OF TAO YUANMING, trans. Red Pine. Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend, WA, 265 pages, $22.00, paper. https://www.coppercanyonpress.org. Here is another book bought on impulse during one of my foraging expeditions to Edmonds Bookshop. To borrow from the Copper Canyon description: “This bilingual collection of over 160 verses chronicles Tao […]
Risa Denenberg: RAIN/DWELLERApril 2, 2024 - 6:41 pm
RAIN/DWELLER, Risa Denenberg. MoonPath Press, P.O. Box 445, Tillamook, OR 27142, 2013, 96 pages, $16.99, paper, http://MoonPathPress.com. Yes, it IS National Poetry Month. Instead of my usual every-day-in-April poetry-binge, I am committed to reading a book of poems each week this year, and posting a review here. So far I think I’m 13/14, but this […]
Lana Hechtman Ayers, WHEN ALL ELSE FAILSMarch 29, 2024 - 11:17 pm
WHEN ALL ELSE FAILS, Lana Hechtman Ayers. The Poetry Box, Portland, OR, 2023, 128 pages, $18.00, https://thepoetrybox.com. When All Else Fails is a book-length memoir, beginning in the dark basement of a childhood of abuse and poverty, isolation, and estrangement. A violent mother, schoolmates who shun and ridicule. But lifting into something above storm-blown shingles […]
Ted Kooser’s WINTER MORNING WALKSMarch 23, 2024 - 3:19 pm
WINTER MORNING WALKS: ONE HUNDRED POEMS TO JIM HARRISON, Ted Kooser. Carnegie-Mellon University Press, Pittsburgh, 2000, 120 pages, $15.95, https://www.cmu.edu/universitypress/. I am here to confess that I have been making everything hard. What brings on such a mood—a straitjacket twisting my arms up and bunching my shoulders so my muscles cramp—is often the newspaper, its […]
Jill McCabe Johnson: DIARY OF THE ONE SWELLING SEAMarch 13, 2024 - 2:25 am
DIARY OF THE ONE SWELLING SEA, Jill McCabe Johnson. MoonPath Press, P.O. Box 445, Tillamook, OR 27142, 2013, 55 pages, $16, paper, http://MoonPathPress.com. Jack Hill, reviewing Jill McCabe Johnson’s Diary of the One Swelling Sea for Prairie Schooner, described it as “a wrenching reminder of why the sea must be loved, cherished, and protected.” I […]
Sarah Kain Gutowski: THE FAMILIARMarch 9, 2024 - 5:52 pm
THE FAMILIAR: POEMS, Sarah Kain Gutowski. Texas Review Press, Huntsville, TX 77341, 2024, 94 pages, $21.95, paper, texasreviewpress.org. I reviewed this book at Escape Into Life (EIL), but now that the hard copy has arrived I’m dipping into its pages again, still feeling astounded by its chutzpah. From the cover: Gutowski’s poems are breathtakingly smart—controlled, […]
Upcoming Reading!March 3, 2024 - 5:38 pm
Long story short, after suffering with the flu in mid-January, I came down with bronchitis, and spent five weeks of my life coughing piteously and avoiding public, in-person events. At long last, THAT is over, and my poetry reading celebrating publication of The Pear Tree: elegy for a farm at Maplewood Presbyterian Church has been […]
Susan Landgraf, CrossingsMarch 2, 2024 - 2:19 am
TRIPLE NO. 17: “Crossings,” Susan Landgraf. Ravenna Press, 2022, pp. 49-82, $12.95, paper, www.ravennapress.com. Ah, the Triples! This is an amazing series from our local Ravenna Press, and well worth your time. Triple No. 17 offers not only a chapbook by Susan Landgraf, but also Philip Quinn’s “Home Movies (from The Afterlife),” and Suzanne Bottelli’s […]
THE ART OF REVISING POETRYFebruary 24, 2024 - 4:57 pm
THE ART OF REVISING POETRY: 21 U.S. POETS ON THEIR DRAFTS, CRAFT, AND PROCESS, edited by Charles Finn and Kim Stafford. Bloomsbury Academic, 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK, 2023, 156 pages, $20.96, paper, www.bloomsbury.com. For this week, a departure from the usual one-poet book. I came across The Art of Revising Poetry last […]