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 […]