Interview // Any Life Is a Miracle: a Conversation with Ellen Bass
Conducted by Meryl Natchez
Conducted by Meryl Natchez
“Rekdal’s poems show characters amidst great transformations, and more importantly, allow the reader to change alongside them.”
Bill Carty on Paisley Rekdal’s Nightingale
James Crews on Ted Kooser’s Kindest Regards>
“Concrete gestures toward beauty, fragile investments in progress. Literal seeds sown.”
Alex Madison on Here: Poems for the Planet
Michele Sharpe on Melissa Stein’s Terrible Blooms
by Jake Uitti | Contributing Writer
Monster of this, / monster if that.
…more than a pool / of smudges and parts.
People chuckled, but it wasn’t affectation: Hicok seems like the kind of man who has trouble keeping either his mind or his body in one place for very long.
Bender: New and Selected Poems Dean Young Copper Canyon Press, 2012 By Carrie A. Purcell, Poetry Northwest Volunteer Coordinator Dean Young’s most recent collection Bender (Copper Canyon 2012) is aptly titled. In this somewhat lengthy collection (it does cover his previous twelve books) Young’s command of discord and resolution are on full display, and the scattershot can make one feel the late-night room spin. Young is after the full force of the world’s oddities; he writes in “Frotage,” “How goofy and horrible is life. Just look into the faces of lovers as they near their drastic destinations…Just look at them handling the vase priced beyond the rational beneath the sign stating the store’s breakage policy, and what is the rational but a thing we must always break.” Young gleefully “breaks the rational” in Bender. His narrative voices are by turns drunk, acerbic, wistful, ridiculous, tender. They speak with authority, however, even if only over the non-sequential details of their biographies: “It seemed … all would be familiar as the beloved’s name heard in a crowd, my …