Page One: Where New and Noteworthy Books Begin
The first lines of a dozen noteworthy books, including Welcome Me to the Kingdom by Mai Nardone and Feast by Ina Cariño.
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Genre: Poetry
Small Press Points: Write Bloody Publishing
Los Angeles press Write Bloody Publishing releases books by “troubadour poets” who can command the stage as well as the page. “We love getting knocked on our asses by honesty,” says Write Bloody founder Derrick C. Brown.
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Patricia Smith on Truth in Poetry
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“More people are turning to [poetry] for truth,” says Patricia Smith in this 2018 interview with Lauren K. Alleyne for The Fight & The Fiddle, the quarterly online publication of the Furious Flower Poetry Center. For more on Smith, read “Unshuttered: Patricia Smith’s Journey Into the Aperture of History” by Tyehimba Jess in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
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Literary MagNet: Jennifer Maritza McCauley
The author of When Trying to Return Home describes her connection with journals that first published her stories, including Jabberwock Review and the Vassar Review.
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Kimiko Hahn on Poetry and Dust
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“Nowadays, I lie down in the sunlight / To see my mama moting around / As sympathetic ash. / Yes, one morning whether misty or yellow / I’ll be soot with her.” In this installment of PBS NewsHour’s “Brief But Spectacular” series, Kimiko Hahn reads her poem “A Dusting,” which appears in her collection Foreign Bodies (Norton, 2022), and speaks about the power of poetry to connect us with our loved ones.
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Vermin
Oftentimes it’s the underrated things in life that make the perfect inspiration for a poem. In “For the Poet Who Told Me Rats Aren’t Noble Enough Creatures for a Poem,” Elizabeth Acevedo rises to the title’s challenge by honoring the “inelegant, simple,” and tenacious animal that is often hunted down. In “St. Roach,” Muriel Rukeyser writes to the humble cockroach and captures the moment in which the speaker reaches out and touches one. This week write a poem inspired by an animal that might be considered vermin and reflect on why you might fear or avoid this creature.
Ten Questions for José Olivarez and David Ruano González
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features José Olivarez and David Ruano González, the author and the translator of Promises of Gold / Promesas de oro.
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Elegy by Linda Pastan
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“Last night the moon lifted itself / on one wing / over the fields.” In this 1992 recording for Howard County Poetry and Literature Society’s The Writing Life, Linda Pastan reads her poem “Elegy,” which appears in her collection Imperfect Paradise (Norton, 1989). Pastan died at the age of ninety on January 30, 2023.
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The Beauty of Being: Debut Poets Virtual Reading
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Poets & Writers Magazine associate editor India Lena González hosts this virtual reading celebrating the ten debut poets featured in “The Beauty of Being: Our Eighteenth Annual Look at Debut Poets” in the January/February issue. The two-part event includes readings from the poets and conversation about their debut books, their influences and inspirations, and their individual paths to publication.
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Our Galactic Neighborhood
If you had the chance to send a poem into space, what would you say? Last week, the Library of Congress announced a collaboration with NASA to send a poem written by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón into space. The poem will be dedicated to NASA’s Europa Clipper mission and engraved on the spacecraft which will travel 1.8 billion miles to Jupiter’s icy moon Europa to gather detailed measurements and determine if the moon has conditions suitable for life. In honor of this momentous occasion, write a poem dedicated to a celestial body of your choice. Explore the galactic neighborhood with NASA’s interactive map of our solar system.
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