I suppose I picked up Sure Signs: New and Selected Poems by Ted Kooser at some AWP conference, because while the book was published in 1980, my copy is crisp and clean (excepting my recent reading of it). The quotes on the back by poets such as Denise Levertov are all predicting the book will [...]

Tony Hoagland’s third book of poetry, What Narcissism Means to Me, has been sitting on my shelf since I purchased a signed copy following his reading at the AWP conference in Austin back in 2005. Three years later, I couldn’t recall any of the specific poems he read, but remember enjoying them quite a bit [...]

Over the last two years, my writer’s mind has been so attuned to creative nonfiction that the poetry bug, mostly, hasn’t been there. And though I’ve read more than a dozen books of poetry this year, and written some poems that are ready to fly, I haven’t had the drive to write poetry, the kind [...]

Just a few days ago I received a slim package from Jane Levin, a contributor to Terrain.org’s current issue and a seasonal resident–this year, at least–of the Sonoran desert. The package arrived from Minnesota, and was filled with Jane’s first chapbook, Legacy, published by Moonflower Press just a few weeks ago. I remember Jane’s single-poem [...]

Brian Turner’s Here, Bullet has received a lot of recognition since it won the 2005 Beatrice Haley Award (and since then a host of others) and published the same year. And rightfully so. The poetry is strong, the topic both horrifying and intensely interesting, the imagery stunning. I’m not sure that there’s been a more [...]

I just finished Emily Wall’s Freshly Rooted and Sheryl Luna’s Pity the Drowned Horses, and as distinct as the poetry in each is, I’m struck by their similarities. Both have a rich relationship to place: landscape fully forms and informs the poetry. For Wall, whose book was published by Ireland’s Salmon Poetry in 2007, the [...]

This summer I hope to catch up on a lot of poetry books I’ve been meaning to read over the last year, or more, but haven’t gotten to for the usual reasons. School’s not out just quite yet, but I still had the opportunity to read Jake Adam York’s A Murmuration of Starlings, his second [...]