Throwback Wednesday? The Poetry Foundation ran my poem, “Homeland Security,” as their audio Poem-of-the-Day today. The first poem I wrote after moving to Arkansas, it will be included in Voices Bright Flags, forthcoming from Waywiser Press in November. Read more ...
Voices Bright Flags—together with recent books by Clive Watkins and Joshua Mehigan—got a nice shout out from AE Stallings in the “Books of the Year” section of the latest Times Literary Supplement. It’s a pleasure to be in such fine company and in such fine pages. Read more ...
I didn’t have time to post this in a timely fashion, but I’ve had two pieces featured on Poetry Daily this past week. My essay “Exhuming Vallejo” (which originally appeared in this month’s issue of Poetry magazine) was the Prose Feature from November 17 to November 23, and on November 23 my poem “About Opera” (which originally appeared in 32 Poems) )was the” poem of the day. Read more ...
“I first read César Vallejo in college, when a Peruvian friend presented me with several of his poems as if they were national treasures she had smuggled through customs. I was struck most forcefully by a strange sonnet called “Piedra negra sobre una piedra blanca.” Read more ...
I’m happy to report that my new book of poems, Voices Bright Flags, is now shipping from Amazon. That’s something I don’t get to say very often: it’s been nine years […] Read more ...
On returning home from our summer holiday last night, I was pleased to find in the mail pile my contributor copies of Poems of the American South (Knopf), edited by David Biespiel. A beautiful book, it draws from several centuries and is shaped by an admirably catholic notion of what constitutes Southern poetry. The fact that the editor chose to include my poem “Trip Hop” rather than one of my more explicitly Southern poems is perhaps indicative of the volume’s fresh take on its subject. Read more ...
The new issue of 32 Poems Magazine contains a bunch of fine poems by some of my favorite poets. Founded by two of my grad school pals from Florida, John Poch and Deb Ager, it has been one of my favorite journals for more than a decade, and its current editor, George David Clark, is doing a terrific job. Read more ...
While wandering dazedly through the AWP Book Fair in Seattle, I stumbled on Something Indecent, a lovely new anthology from the Poetry Foundation, and was delighted to find that it included my translation of one of my favorite Cesare Pavese poems, “Grappa in September,” from Disaffections. Regarding that poem, the editor, Valzhyna Mort, says: “This is how you stop a moment and turn it into eternity.” Read more ...
I’m very pleased to have a poem of mine—a ten-part sequence called “Staring Back at Us”—included in Lines in Long Array, a gorgeous anthology commemorating the sesquicentennial of the Civll War. Beautifully conceived by editors David Ward and Frank Goodyear and exquisitely illustrated with Sally Mann photographs, it was published by Smithsonian Books and launched in November at the National Portrait Gallery. Read more ...
I contributed ten or so translations to My Poems Won’t Change the World, an excellent selection by editor Gini Alhadeff of poems by the Patrizia Cavalli, one of my favorite contemporary Italian poets. Read more ...