This fall, I taught an online writing course meant to help poets put together and prepare their first poetry collections for publication. Though I’d designed the course to be about the practicalities of structuring, formatting, and submitting their manuscripts, by the third class meeting, our conversations had diverged to the role of surprise in poetry. …
Poet Ross Gay tasked himself with what sounds like a job for a Hallmark greeting card writer: he spent a year looking for things that gave him joy, be they people, places, or events big or small. Unlike the sentiments usually found on schmaltzy greeting cards, though, the brief prose essays that Gay has written …
National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman wowed at the Inauguration. You can preorder her upcoming books with your local independent bookstore now!
Watch this video recommendation by Hanna from Rediscovered Books in Boise, ID. The Poet X won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, the Michael L. Printz Award, and the Pura Belpré Award. More praise, this time from favorite authors: “Crackles with energy and snaps with authenticity and voice.” —Justina Ireland, author of Dread …
by Shann Ray Published in the Inlander March 21, 2020 Have you ever heard the voice of a loved one speaking over you with unexpected kindness? In times of stress, that voice can be almost unbearably rare. I’ve been thinking about how the 24-hour news cycle is often far from gentle, not at all concerned with …
Ocean Vuong is a pretty famous poet, and this is his debut novel. It is so beautiful, exquisite, raw, and heartbreaking that you question: how is this NOT a memoir? It is set all over the place–they moved quite a bit. The main character, Little Dog, is writing this book as a letter to his …
From the Island Books newsletter April 17, 2019 I’ve been writing poetry, or something resembling that, consistently since I was eleven years old. I’ve always liked words, the energy, the power, and the meanings that all vary. Unlike prose writing, poetry offers up a canvas of possibility in its negative space. I found I was …
Did you know that Port Townsend’s Copper Canyon Press is open for poetry manuscript submissions through August 31? The non-profit publisher dedicated to poetry has a reading period every summer, and 2013’s window for submissions closes at the end of this month. Poets with a book-length poetry manuscript that you would like them to read …
