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: April 16, 2009
"If you feel that high emotion and unalienated confession is not art, as Slavoj Zizek might assert that it cops to the System where the individual is valued for trying […]
Date: April 16, 2009
"Brown's awareness of the book's form, its how in addition to its what, allows for these poems' rich complexities. The order not only forms a linear narrative, but layers experience. […]
Date: April 16, 2009
"The strength of Sister is in the details, some of which are constructed through Brown's diction, which is gently infused with a southern dialect but resists caricature. She writes of […]
Date: April 16, 2009
"To write of one's own conception, gestation, birth"to write convincingly of unknowable-yet-familiar moments: that is the power of poetry and the power of Nickole Brown's debut, Sister, a self-styled "novel-in-poems.' […]
Date: April 16, 2009
"Nickole Brown's poems marry an enthralling and tormented narrative with woven, specific lyricism to create a layered progression through a difficult past. Brown has immediate access to how the situations […]
Date: April 16, 2009
"Using umbilicus as guide rail, the speaker of Nickole Brown's Sister–an unflinching and deeply intelligent first book–undertakes a hair-lifting expedition back to her childhood so as to return herself to […]
Date: April 16, 2009
"It would be easy to say that this collection is an indictment, but there is nothing easy about these poems. They are each skillfully wrought pieces about impossible subjects. . […]
Date: April 16, 2009
"Brown's forthright debut opens with an intimate address to a sister: "I tell you this story because it is / the story we need / to believe our offal is […]
Date: April 14, 2009
Time Out LondonMotel Girl (Red Hen Press) is the debut collection of New York writer Greg Sanders. Like many debut collections it draws material from a decade of writing, going […]
Date: April 13, 2009
John Domini Earthquake I.D. Red Hen (CDC, dist.) $20.95 (320p) ISBN 978-1-59709-076-6Des Moines author John Domini has won awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Meridian Editors […]