In the Dark: Meeting Larry Levis

by Christopher Buckley In Memoriam: Larry Levis Waking in the dark, Daylight Savings gone, I’m remembering the Biltmore hotel in L.A., killing the afternoon at the MLA in 1981, the hopeful with their haircuts upstairs being grilled like fish. I knew better then than to hope. I’m remembering that dark empty bar there Larry and […]

Review of THE DIRT RIDDLES by Michael Walsh

University of Arkansas Press, 2010  $16.00 reviewed by James Crews In the glut of poetry books being published these days, it’s easy for collections like Michael Walsh’s The Dirt Riddles to get lost in the shuffle. Perhaps it’s also easy in our current literary climate for poets who choose to write accessibly about the natural […]

Once More to the Cradle

by David Axelrod Whenever you enjoy finding your way through a writer’s entire work, reach the end of it because he or she is no longer alive, and you can only look back now, though wishing there were more, it seems inevitable that you will want to know something about the writer’s life. Have you […]

Review of Paradise, Indiana by Bruce Snider

Pleiades Press, 2012 Softcover, $16.95 Reviewed by James Crews I highly recommend getting a hold of Bruce Snider’s latest collection of poems, Paradise, Indiana and reading it back-to-back with his first book, the Felix Pollak Prize-winning The Year We Studied Women, published in 2003 by the University of Wisconsin Press. These two volumes are not […]

John Davis Wins 2012 Bunchgrass Poetry Prize 2012

John Davis of Bainbridge Island, WA, is the winner of the second annual Bunchgrass Poetry Prize for his poem “Your Mustache.” The judge for this year’s competition was Michael McGriff, author of Dismantling the Hills (Pitt). In addition to publication in the spring 2012 print and electronic versions of basalt, Mr.Davis will receive a cash […]

Review of Touch by Henri Cole

Farrar, Straus, Giroux 2011 Hardcover, $23 by James Crews Henri Cole’s Touch is a dark but redemptive book. These poems—many of them sonnets—strike an elegiac, confessional tone as Cole reconstructs his personal history through memory, dreams and observations of the ordinary in the natural world. Touch builds upon the mastery already in full display in […]

Review of Forms and Hollows by Heather Dubrow

Cherry Grove Collections, 2011 Softcover $15 Reviewed by James Crews Heather Dubrow’s first collection of poetry, Forms and Hollows, opens with an extended elegy for her mother and makes use of a dizzying range of poetic forms—everything from sonnets and villanelles to a canzone and ghazal. These are some of the forms, of course, indicated […]

Review of On Speaking Terms by Connie Wanek

Copper Canyon Press, 2010 Softcover, $15.00 Reviewed by James Crews Every once in a while a book of poetry will fall into your hands and—perhaps not expecting much at first—you read it in one sitting, breathing a sigh of relief that you have discovered a new poet (new to you, at least) whose work actually […]

James Crews & Travis Mossotti Reading at EOU

Jon Davis Reading at EOU