Courting the Place Where Anything Can Happen: Openness to the Unexpected

by Scott Elliott   One of the most dubious-sounding pieces of advice teachers of creative writing sometimes hear themselves offering their students is “make sure you don’t know where you’re going when you set out to write a story, essay, or poem.” This advice flies in the face of what younger students hear in their […]

Review of The Wheeling Year: A Poet’s Field Book by Ted Kooser

University of Nebraska Press, 2014 by James Crews A book of hours was a daily devotional text popular with Christians in the Middle Ages. Each manuscript was written in the vernacular of the period and listed the appropriate prayers for specific times of the day, days of the week and months of the year, making […]

Review of Caribou by Charles Wright

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014 by James Crews On a long flight years ago, the woman next to me kept interrupting my reading of Charles Wright’s Negative Blue: New and Selected Poems (2001) to make polite small talk. Eventually, she came to the inevitable question: “What do you do?” When I confessed I was a […]

Lessons of Time, Velocity, and Hard Music: Remembering Walt Pavlich

By Thomas Aslin This morning I searched through my file cabinet before latching onto a file of letters and postcards from the late poet Walter Pavlich. One card, mailed from New Orleans, and covered with Walt’s odd, inky scrawl—half in cursive, half in crabbed-print-style lettering—refers with some heat to the scantily dressed blonde on the […]

Review of Darkened Rooms of Summer by Jared Carter

University of Nebraska Press, 2014   $18.95 paper by James Crews The spherical stones were everywhere on the Oregon beach where we were walking. When I asked my scientist-friend what they were, she explained that they’re called concretions, and they form when a lump of cement lodges in sedimentary strata that has already been deposited, […]

Review of Darkness Sticks to Everything by Tom Hennen

Copper Canyon Press, 2013 $18 paper by James Crews   I am sad to say that, perhaps like many readers, I had never heard of Tom Hennen until a poet-friend sent me a few pieces from Darkness Sticks to Everything. This volume finally collects all of Hennen’s past work, along with his new poems, into […]