A Big House with Many Rooms: A Conversation with Connie Wanek

by James Crews Connie Wanek is the author of three collections of poetry: Bonfire (1997), winner of the New Voices Award from New Rivers Press; Hartley Field (2002), and most recently, On Speaking Terms (2010), published by Copper Canyon Press. She is also co-editor, with Joyce Sutphen and Thom Tammaro, of To Sing Along the […]

“This Is a Junior”: On Meeting Roethke

by William Pitt Root In spring term 1963 at UW, I attended Theodore Roethke’s class in an overcrowded room in Parrington Hall. I’d heard that on his way to his classes he greatly resembled a wounded elephant. To me he seemed more like a large, beardless, out of work Santa Claus (pink cheeks, white hair, […]

Four Recent Chapbooks

The Laughing Game by Marianne Kunkel Finishing Line Press, 2012 $14 paper the lake has no saint by Stacey Waite Tupelo Press, 2010 $9.95 paper The Edge of Damage by Heather Swan Parallel Press, 2009 $12 paper My Life as an Island by Travis Mossotti Moon City Press, 2013 $7.95 paper Reviewed by James Crews […]

Review of Incarnadine by Mary Szybist

Graywolf Press, 2013 $10 paper By James Crews It’s been ten years since Mary Szybist’s first collection, Granted (2003), was published to much acclaim, and lucky for us, Szybist did not rush her next book of poems. Reading through her second collection, Incarnadine, published by Graywolf Press earlier this year, one gets the sense that […]

Review of Earth Again by Chris Dombrowski

Wayne State University Press, 2013 $15.95 paper Review by James Crews In Earth Again, Chris Dombrowski taps into our collective fears about the future of the planet and the ways in which we can and cannot connect as humans with the natural world. Dombrowski is the author of one previous collection, By Cold Water (Wayne […]

Return to a Meadow: Remembering Robert Duncan

By Carlos Reyes I first met Robert Duncan in the fall of 1968, at Seattle’s Union Station. He had come to Washington as poet-in-residence for a symposium at Central Washington University, where my good friend Phil Garrison was teaching. Phil knew how much I admired this well-known poet of the Black Mountain School, this lion of […]

Places of Making: An Interview with Jennifer Boyden

by James Crews Jennifer Boyden is the author of The Mouths of Grazing Things, selected by Robert Pinsky as winner of the Brittingham Prize in Poetry in 2010. Her second book, The Deliverable Future, won the Four Lakes Prize in Poetry and is forthcoming from the University of Wisconsin Press. [A number of poems from  […]