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: May 22, 2024
Prolific Murfreesboro poet Gaylord Brewer turns his hand to short nonfiction in Before the Storm Takes It Away, his latest from Red Hen Press. While the structure of the 125 pieces […]
Date: May 21, 2024
Typically resourceful and resilient, Annika Rose Rogers has become stuck. Plunged into painful limbo after her high school graduation, the titular heroine of Cheri Johnson’s debut novel is fast outgrowing […]
Date: May 15, 2024
William Trowbridge has stopped by the pages of Light before in the guise of Oldguy (Reviews, Summer/Fall 2020). Now he’s back with a collection recounting the exploits of a classic persona, The Fool, traced […]
Date: May 15, 2024
Brice previously chronicled her Alaska youth in “Unlearning to Fly.” In “Another North,” she returns to Fairbanks as a divorced woman longing for a sense of home. The new collection […]
Date: May 15, 2024
Everett’s formally virtuosic latest collection (after The Book of Training by Colonel Hap Thompson of Roanoke) interrogates the sonnet form as both a mode for thought and a vehicle for sonic […]
Date: May 14, 2024
This review appears in the Spring, 2024 issue, no. 51, pp. 223-7. To Move Wild Laughter Near the end Shakespeare’s Love’s Labours Lost, the heroine, Rosaline, tells her suitor […]
Date: May 14, 2024
This review appears in vol. 63, no. 1, fall, 2023, pp. 54-6. FOOLISH VIRTUOSITY William Trowbridge. Call Me Fool. Pasadena, CA: Red Hen Press, 2022. $17.95, paper. William Trowbridge […]
Date: May 13, 2024
Blue Atlas by Susan Rich takes its title from the Blue Atlas Cedar found in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco. As the book’s epigraph explains: “It is the hardiest species and […]
Date: May 13, 2024
Pioneer Press has names ANNIKA ROSE by Cheri Johnson as one of their three fiction works from Minnesota authors. The full review is in the link below!
Date: May 8, 2024
Susan Rich’s newest collection, Blue Atlas, is a complicated work that artfully blends the personal and the political, avoiding didacticism to create a timely narrative that explores the themes of […]