Author: Staff

Billie Swift: “Dear viscera, – Kelly Davio’s Burn This House”

Published by Staff

Burn This House Kelly Davio Red Hen Press, 2013 — Burn This House, Kelly Davio’s debut poetry collection, is peppered with visceral images so precise they evoke poetic contemplation during even the most humdrum of moments. While walking to my car, I suddenly find myself considering the way “leather fits / at my calf with the native snugness / it must have had on the heifer.” When I’m lying in bed listening to the routine shift and rustle of my husband as he settles in to sleep, the lines “I feel your skull move against / my pillow” bring a renewed intimacy to the moment. Davio’s attention to—and deft handling of—her craft extends to the smallest details, as evidenced in the wonderful pacing and lineation of her epigraph for the poem “Gammelfleisch”: “Literally, ‘spoiled meat.’ Also used by German youth / as slang for people over thirty.” These “people over thirty” populate a great many of the poems in this collection, throughout which Davio explores and challenges the constraints of the body, often from the …

Bill Carty: “Working its Own Salvation: Dan Beachy-Quick’s A Brighter Word Than Bright”

Published by Staff

A Brighter Word Than Bright Dan Beachy-Quick University of Iowa Press, 2013 — In a rejected preface to his long poem Endymion, John Keats—apparently not having internalized the workshop admonition “no disclaimers”—writes: “. . . this Poem must rather be considerd as an endeavour than a thing accomplish’d; a poor prologue to what, if I live, I humbly hope to do.” But Endymion, however inadequate in its author’s mind, was not an exercise without reward. The criticism that the young poet faced, both internal and external, became a transformative experience. As biographer W. Jackson Bate explains: Another reaction was his strong dislike [after Endymion] of forcing himself to write for the mere sake of writing. . . .  For the same reason he was henceforth to feel freer, if a longer poem was not developing the way he hoped, to leave it unfinished and turn to something else; and his eagerness to publish subsided until, by contrast, it almost approached indifference. In A Brighter Word Than Bright (University of Iowa Press, 2013), Dan Beachy-Quick undertakes …

Zach Savich: “Easy, Durable Dreams: Notes on Poetry and Social Media”

Published by Staff

In June 2014, poet Mathias Svalina promises to operate a Dream Delivery Service. “I will write the dreams, without consultation with the dreamer, & deliver them daily,” Svalina writes. “Each dream is unique to the dreamer/subscriber.” Subscriptions cost $40 if you live within three miles of Svalina’s house, $55 for everyone else. Dream Delivery Service as social media. * Svalina is an editor with Octopus Books. A while ago, another Octopus editor, Zachary Schomburg, started posting portraits of his friends on his blog, The Lovely Arc. He’d honor each as “Person of the Week” and write a brief profile. “Jesse got Clyde Drexler’s autograph three times between fifth and seventh grade,” Schomburg wrote. “He went to a Waldorf school from kindergarten through third grade, so he learned to knit, crochet, paint with watercolor, sculpt beeswax, play the recorder, and count in German before he learned arithmetic.” “Person of the Week” as social media. * Discussions of social media and poetry often focus on poetry’s absorption of—or reduction to—familiar virtual modes.

The Subvocal Zoo: Bonus Episode – Richie Hofmann Reads “Mirror”

Published by Staff

Poetry Northwest‘s monthly podcast series, The Subvocal Zoo, features editors and friends of the magazine interviewing poets. Each episode features lively conversation between writers in a different location. This month’s regular episode, featuring Timothy Donnelly, will be available soon. In the meantime, we’d like to share a great outtake from an earlier episode. This Bonus Mini-Episode features Richie Hofmann reading his poem “Mirror” into the wind on the top deck of a ferry just before debarking in Seattle.

Greg Bem: The Body Politic – Brian Foley’s The Constitution

Published by Staff

The Constitution Brian Foley Black Ocean, 2013 — “As soon as we finish we want to be understood again.” (from “Amendment”, p. 10) The Constitution is a book of lessons, a book of learning how to become one with what is known and unknown. The first epiphany: that we each have our own body. We are individual. The second: that we must understand it. To Foley, our body is a universal placard of self-definition. What is health? What is our constitution? By coming to know our limits and our place in the world, we know our humanity, our personal composition. “As soon as we finish / we want to be // understood again” says the first Amendment, and so continues an enduring loop of self-examination. The body of the self, in the case of Foley’s book, is represented by the book and its speaker’s curiosities: namely, how is it to exist and to be okay with our own health and stability? In “Object Lesson,” “more than / one angry Achilles / is made into // …

Wendy Willis: “A Million People On One String – Notes on Poetry and Social Media”

Published by Staff

These days, it’s all big data all the time. Over the past few months, I’ve seen headlines ranging from “Big Data or Big Brother?” to “Big Data’s Little Brother” to “Big Data at the Oscars.” Just today, I was solicited for a webinar entitled “Big Data is a Big Deal!”(exclamation point theirs). As Duke psychologist and behavioral economist Don Ariely recently quipped on his Facebook page:  “Big data is like teenage sex:  everyone talks about it, nobody knows how to do it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it.” But the big data debate is not entirely made up of cutesy wordplay. Ever since Edward Snowden first started leaking information about the massive U.S. government spying operation, Americans—for the first time in over a decade—started kicking up some real, honest-to-goodness dust about whether the government can do whatever it pleases if it claims to be protecting us from terrorists. And then there’s the “creepy” index that seems to be the new—if somewhat ephemeral—standard for just how far the …

Kristen Steenbeeke: “‘You want your dream masts to rise’ – Emily Kendal Frey’s Sorrow Arrow“

Published by Staff

Sorrow Arrow Emily Kendal Frey Octopus Books — EKF: “
 as I grow less and less interested in the mind, insofar as making “sense” (at least along any lines of logic) of my experience, the more willing I become to stay in feelings.” (Interview with Nicholas Sturm, Bookslut) *** “Let’s do an interpretive dance and call it Jonathan Franzen” (@EmilyKendalFrey) *** Emily Kendal Frey’s Sorrow Arrow reads as a sentence- and poem-collage, one that upends then rebuilds itself nearly every other phrase. And it’s not just the images that make up the collage—it’s the way that Frey juxtaposes macro and micro: the universe shrinks to a composted watermelon rind, Love is packed into the skin of a tangerine. Frey says (I’m projecting) love is big—wait, no it’s not, it’s insignificant as rotting fruit. *** EKF: “Most writers working prior to the last fifty years had a persona that pretty much came from their work, but now there are all these other sources
” (Interview with Lisa Wells, OmniVerse) And so a poet is a living person …