Review of At Home by Ted Kooser

Review of At Home by Ted Kooser

Posted on July 8, 2017

Comstock Review Press, 2017. $14 by James Crews Ted Kooser’s latest chapbook, At Home, might as well be called, At Home in the World, since even this abbreviated collection of poems shows a writer fully comfortable not only with himself, but also with his place in rural America. For decades now, Kooser’s Nebraska has become […]


Review of The Beauty by Jane Hirshfield

Review of The Beauty by Jane Hirshfield

Posted on April 20, 2016

Knopf, 2015 $19.94 (hardback) by James Crews There is some new and dazzling force at work in The Beauty, Jane Hirshfield’s latest and much-anticipated collection of poetry. Yet I must admit, I didn’t entirely appreciate the rawness and unpredictability of these poems at first. I have been a fan of Hirshfield’s for well over a […]


The Art of Losing: Love Lives of Elizabeth Bishop

The Art of Losing: Love Lives of Elizabeth Bishop

Posted on January 28, 2016

Review by Scott Edward Anderson When telling someone else’s story – perhaps even one’s own – it is hard not to do so from a certain perspective or position. Two recent films whose subject is the poet Elizabeth Bishop provide examples of distinct storytelling approaches: the first, a documentary with a particular political slant; the […]


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

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

Posted on November 6, 2014

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 […]


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

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

Posted on May 26, 2014

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 Darkness Sticks to Everything by Tom Hennen

Posted on January 23, 2014

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 […]


Once More to the Cradle

Once More to the Cradle

Posted on September 28, 2012

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 […]


An Occupation

Posted on March 14, 2012

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 […]


Is Poetry Gay?

Posted on March 14, 2012

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 […]


National Poetry Month: The Health Report by Travis Mossotti

Posted on March 8, 2012

And so another April begins. A month where the poetry community in America, fractured and bitter as it may be, feels compelled by nationalistic pride or obligation to reassess the health and status of poetry in the country. The Academy of American Poets website says it is a time when “poets around the country band […]