James Crews & Travis Mossotti Reading at EOU

Jon Davis Reading at EOU

NewPages Review of basalt vol 6, no 1

Basalt Volume 6 Number 1 2011 Annual Review by Robyn Campbell Although Basalt is based in and linked to the state of Oregon—taking its name from the igneous rock prevalent in the northwestern U.S.—a number of the pieces in this latest issue seem interested in crossing or expanding borders. While the front and back covers […]

Review of The Salt Ecstasies by James L. White

The Salt Ecstasies by James L. White Graywolf Press Re/View Series, Soft,  $15 Reviewed by James Crews James L. White’s The Salt Ecstasies, recently re-issued by Graywolf Press for their wonderful new RE/VIEW Series, edited by Mark Doty, is more than just a gay classic; it’s a rich and rare book that has been out-of-print […]

An Occupation

by David A. Axelrod In his recent blog posts to this site, “Is Myth Still Relevant to Poetry,” James Crews revisits Tony Hoagland’s essay, in Real Sofistikashun, about the “skittery” poems of the present—oblique, fractured, discontinuous, and, moreover, distrustful of language’s and narrative’s ability to represent reality. In a separate review, Crews also quotes this […]

Review of About the Dead by Travis Mossotti,

About the Dead by Travis Mossotti, Utah State University Press, Cloth $19.95 reviewed by James Crews In his 2011 May Swenson Award-winning first book, About the Dead, Travis Mossotti sketches a larger-than-life canvas for his readers, taking us from Van Gogh’s home in Arles, France to Aynor, South Carolina, to the Meramec River in “backwoods” […]

Is Poetry Gay?

by James Crews On a flight from San Francisco to Chicago a few years ago, I happened to be reading a book of poetry—Charles Wright’s Negative Blue: Selected Later Poems. I was absorbed, but the woman next to me—maybe bored by her own copy of The Da Vinci Code—felt compelled to strike up a conversation […]

Review of Come, Thief by Jane Hirshfield

Come, Thief by Jane Hirshfield Knopf, Cloth $25 Reviewed by James Crews In her now-classic book of essays on the craft of poetry, Nine Gates, Jane Hirshfield writes, “Solitude, whether endured or embraced is a necessary gateway to original thought: only a writer who fears neither abandonment nor self-presence can write without distortion.” As one […]

Upcoming Readings at EOU

Maxine Scates March 14 • 7:30 p.m. • Huber Auditorium Scates is the author most recently of Undone (New Issues Press). She is coeditor, with David Trinidad, of Holding Our Own: The Selected Poems of Ann Stanford. Her work has received the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, the Oregon Book Award for Poetry, the Lyre […]

Practical Advice to Aspiring Poets Living in the 21st Century by Travis Mossotti

And so it was I entered the broken world To trace the visionary company of love… ~from Hart Crane’s, “The Broken Tower” I suppose I could offer up nuggets of wisdom to you like: use number two pencils, write outdoors, listen to Bach’s Aria variata in A minor, look at the sky for the thing […]