Joanna Thomas writes uncommon books, and this one, bluebird (bloo-burd), is no exception. What great fun to find it this week in my mail. As explained at the website for Milk & Cake Press, blue-bird (bloo•burd) employs the lipogram, a poetic constraint which requires that a poet not use a certain letter of the alphabet. […]
I learned from The Poetry Foundation that Jane Wong is the author of How to Not Be Afraid of Everything (Alice James Books, 2021) and Overpour (Action Books, 2016), and she is an assistant professor of creative writing at Western Washington University. Overpour is another of the books I’ll be reading in my “Writing Alongside Local […]
It’s Earth Day, and this morning I spent my early hours rereading Passings, 15 poems about extinct birds—a luminous, heartbreaking, award-winning collection of poems from Holly J. Hughes. Passings was first published in 2016 by Expedition Press as a limited-edition letterpress chapbook. It garnered national attention in 2017 when it received an American Book Award from […]
I really do sincerely feel that bewilderment is at the core of every great poem, and in order to be bewildered, you have to be able to wonder. You absolutely have to be permeable to wonder. —Kaveh Akbar A neighboring blog (so to speak), The Poetry Department…aka The Boynton Blog, not long ago posted this […]