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June 21, 2018"The Poet’s Responsibility is to His or Her Poem" Darren Bifford on Poetry Culture & Community
Darren Bifford's False Spring (Brick Books) is devastatingly timely, concerned as it is with the concept of collapse and cultural crisis. Tough, urgent, and unabashed, the poems in the collection push ...
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July 12, 2018"Here Might Be a Path Out of Myself" Steve McOrmond on Discovering Poetry
Steve McOrmond's Reckon (Brick Books) is his first book since the widely-praised The Good News About Armageddon was published in 2010. Reckon is worth the wait, packed with poems that balance wit ...
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July 10, 2019Susan Buis, Poets & Author of Gatecrasher, on What Can Be Done with Words
Self, land, ownership - as our understanding of these concepts because to evolve and grow, we find ourselves making new connections and relationships. In Susan Buis' Gatecrasher (Invisible Publishing), ...
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April 26, 2019Poet Ayaz Pirani on Oral Tradition, Literary Gatekeepers, and Writing Faithful Lines
Ayaz Pirani's work has been praised as "wise... surprising [and] sly" and his newest collection, Kabir’s Jacket Has a Thousand Pockets (Mawenzi House), builds on his characteristic insightful, elegant ...
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September 05, 2018Julie Bruck on the Beauty of Found Sources, Poems with Long Tails, & the Best and Worst Things About Being a Poet
Who says it's impossible to be serious and hilarious at the same time? Julie Bruck proves that it can be done with her daring, inventive, witty, and gutsy How to Avoid Huge Ships (Brick Books), a collection ...
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May 26, 2021"Mysteries and Tensions and Splinters of Awe" Poet Michael Lithgow on Craft, Inspiration, & Great Reads
Behind the facade of comfort or beauty lurk questions and uncertainties — the things we're not only unsure if we know, but if we want to know. Such is the tension of Michael Lithgow's haunting second ...
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November 04, 2020"If Someone Feeds Me Wonder, They Have My Heart" Poet Sarah Venart on the Long Road to Her Powerful New Collection
Poet Sarah Venart dives deep into love, family, need, and grief in her powerful new collection I Am the Big Heart (Brick Books). But what is the big heart? In these poems, big-heartedness means being ...
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October 09, 2019"There's a Moment When Everything's Heightened" Marlene Cookshaw on the Synchronicity and Bliss of Poetry
Marlene Cookshaw's new poetry collection Mowing (Brick Books), her first in over ten years, was worth the wait. Focused on themes of harvest, both literal and figurative, it's a meditative, beautiful ...
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October 02, 2019"Delight & Surprise Have to Carry Through a Whole Poem" Chris Banks on His Process, the Poem He Reads Daily, & His Beautiful Losers
Waterloo-based poet Chris Banks' fifth collection, Midlife Action Figure (ECW Press) is uncommonly fun, with Banks' playfulness on full display in lines like his comparison of time and memory to "a ...
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April 13, 2018"I Write to Make Sense of Worries" David James Brock on Finding the Calm in Poetry
Poet, librettist, and playwright David James Brock's second collection Ten-Headed Alien (Wolsak & Wynn), is making an impact as big and bold as its title. Poet Linda Besner called it "a sophisticated ...
