Poetry

Volume 1, Issue 1. June 2012.

Wheeler on Richard Burgin’s Shadow Traffic and Ron Rash’s The Cove | Dawes on Teju Cole’s Open City and Tayari Jones’ Silver Sparrow | Harlan-Orsi on emily m. danforth’s The Miseducation of Cameron Post | Das on Adil Jussawalla’s Trying to Say Goodbye | Crews on Bruce Snider’s Paradise, Indiana

Richard Burgin. Shadow Traffic. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011.

Reviewed by Theodore Wheeler

Eric Weinstein’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Best New Poets 2009 anthology, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Ploughshares, and others. He was named a finalist for both the Poetry Foundation’s 2011 Ruth Lilly Fellowship and the 2011 National Poetry Series. He lives in New York City.

One of the many things I admire about A Mind Like This is its broad historical spectrum. Some poems profile 19th-century authors while others incorporate aspects of contemporary life such as the phrases “I downloaded a favorite song” and “wind / that bitchslapped me.” What is gained by letting cutting-edge, colloquial diction into your poems?

A reader who continues to the next line? English is in a constant thrash, and trying to hang onto its tail can make for a fine ride as long as you have friends who will occasionally look over their glasses at you and say "No. Just ... no."

We're a little late announcing it here, but Mary O'Donnell's poem "Sea Life in St. Mark's Square" was just yesterday the featured poem on Poetry Daily. You can still find the piece, which is from our current issue, of course, at this link.

It is a great poem from a deserving poet, and one we're proud to have it recognized like this.

Micheal O’Siadhail's thirteen collections of poetry include Tongues, Globe, Love Life, The Gossamer Wall: Poems in Witness to the Holocaust, and Poems 1975-1995. He has been awarded an Irish American Cultural Institute Prize and a Toonder Prize, and he was shortlisted for the Wingate Jewish Quarterly Prize. He has been a lecturer at Trinity College, Dublin, and a professor at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. His poem "Conversation with Goethe" appears in our current issue.

Name three things of particular significance on your writing desk at the moment.

I have on my desk a book which traces the origin of Japanese characters and how pictographs combine in various ways to form complex ideographs. These signs fascinate me and in my latest book Tongues I devoted a whole section to meditating on them.

Born in Dublin in 1970, Nuala Ní Chonchúir lives in Galway county. Her début novel You (New Island, 2010) was called ‘a heart-warmer’ by The Irish Times and ‘a gem’ by The Irish Examiner. Her third short story collection Nude (Salt, 2009)) was shortlisted for the UK’s Edge Hill Prize. Her second short story collection To The World of Men, Welcome has just been re-issued by Arlen House in an expanded paperback edition.

Mary O’Donnell has published six collections of poetry, most recently The Ark Builders (Arc Publications). She has also written three novels and two short-story collections, has won prizes in the V.S. Pritchett Competition and was the overall winner of the 2010 Fish International Short Story Competition. She is guest poet in the National University of Ireland-Maynooth in the creative writing program. Her poems "Sea Life in St. Mark's Square" and "Baby Boy, Quaryat al Beri" appear in the forthcoming Winter 2011 issue of Prairie Schooner, aka the Ireland Issue. (Subscribers should see the issue in their mailboxes soon!)

Name three things on your writing desk at the moment.

How Like a Winter

She spent the days of December reading
Shakespeare's sonnets. Sleepy icicles dripped

from her eyelashes, but she kept reading.
Her family decorated the tree

while she sat in the leather chair reading,
opening Vendler's book when ideas failed.

She wore a discolored sweatshirt that read
Shakespeare's Muse, carried a Mont Blanc pen

behind her ear. You could see her reading
in midnight mass near the back of the church.

While the believers knelt and prayed, she read
and worried about forgetting to shop.

The city was Christmas ghosts, lights of red.
She was buried in the snow of sonnets.

(You can learn more about the work of Kelli Russell Agodon at her web site.)