Black Earth Institue: Social Distancing
Date: June 4, 2020
In dreams I walk through crowds, brushing arms, knocking elbows. Skin to skin: hands are bare. Crocuses congregate in beds, along sidewalks. Unlatching city gates,
Date: June 4, 2020
In dreams I walk through crowds, brushing arms, knocking elbows. Skin to skin: hands are bare. Crocuses congregate in beds, along sidewalks. Unlatching city gates,
Date: June 4, 2020
A flare of russet,green fronds, surpriseof flush againstthe bare grey cypressin winter woods. Cardinal wild pine,quill-leaf airplantor dog-drink-water.Spikes of bright bloom–exotic plumage.
Date: June 4, 2020
“Be stubborn and ultimately believe in your writing,” advises first-time novelist Mia Heavener ’00, “especially if you are having crappy writing days.” On April 13, Heavener visited Wyn Kelley’s literature […]
Date: June 4, 2020
Tess Taylor’s new poetry collection Rift Zone is published this month. She shares five books about writing place in a time of crisis.
Date: June 4, 2020
Poet Tess Taylor questioned what it means to be creative, when every day feels like a radical reinvention of life. “These days, helping myself and my family steer a way around sadness, […]
Date: June 4, 2020
LINCOLN, Neb. — My mother was born into a flu-stricken household at the height of the pandemic of 1918. Within minutes she was swaddled in a homemade quilt and placed […]
Date: June 4, 2020
1985 Long and black, the streaksof gray, aflutter in the lightwind as she prepares to tell her story at the Federal Building:reaching into a tattered sackshe pulls out a doll […]
Date: June 4, 2020
The Skin of Meaning He was late to the party and without directions,though his invitation was secure, and his instinctskeenly honed to an acceptable edge, and as we arewaiting to […]
Date: June 4, 2020
Ascension Didi Jackson The blue jays lay claimto the raspberry busharriving in groups of four or five:one holds a rubied berry in its beakand feeds it up in the white […]
Date: June 4, 2020
after Käthe Kollwitz I heard they no longer sew eyelids of the dead shut.At the morgue, I busied myself countingthe lacerations on my husband’s neck and wrists.I wore sunglasses and […]
Date: June 28, 2023
n this time of acrimony and push-button polemics, it is a rare pleasure to discover a writer whose politically engaged poetry is vividly alive to the nuances evoked by incisive […]
Date: June 22, 2023
A man revisits his unconventional relationship with his father. This book begins in the wake of loss as narrator Hector Peterson points out that he and his father, Winston Telemacque, […]
Date: June 12, 2023
Many of the poems in Bell’s second full-length book explore suffering and sadness through a very personal lens: terrifying moments of objectification and sexual violation; the desolation and isolation that […]
Date: June 6, 2023
In this work of poetry, Vuong unbinds what gets lost while carrying the aftermath from Vietnamese voices that have been longing to breathe after the disruption from wars, migration, and […]
Date: June 6, 2023
A strong poetic sensibility is combined with a successful conversational style in several insightful accounts of familiar situations, like seeing people in airports that one thinks one knows (‘Long Haul’), […]
Date: June 6, 2023
As we enter another Pride month, it feels as though 2023 has been one of the toughest legislative years for LGBTQ+ folks in a long time. As we witness and […]
Date: June 6, 2023
I’ve always found poetry a bit intimidating. Sometimes I think I know where one is going, then out of nowhere I’m thrown for a loop and left puzzled with a […]
Date: June 5, 2023
The illegitimate daughter of a white mother and a Jordanian father, Halaby, author of two novels and two collections of poetry, felt that she was a “fiction…squished between other people’s […]
Date: June 1, 2023
Ghost Apples, the ninth collection of poems by Katharine Coles – who might be a witch (IMHO) given the ready way she connects with animals (including her parrot Henri, pronounced […]
Date: June 1, 2023
I review Phuong T. Vuong’s A Plucked Zither, from Red Hen Press (June 6, 2023). Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/versecurious/donations