Stephen Burt's Blog, page 3
March 11, 2014
A Nickel on Top of a Penny and Black Raspberry Canes (VQR)
The Virginia Quarterly Review kindly published A Nickel on Top of a Penny and Black Raspberry Canes in the Winter 2014 issue.
Beautiful photo by Susy Morris on Flickr, used under Creative Commons.
March 14, 2014: Grolier Poetry Bookshop “Poetry: What’s Next”
If you’re a local, this Friday at 7pm you can join me, Robert Archambeau, and Ben Mazer at the Grolier Poetry Bookshop in Harvard Square. We hope you’ll leave with lots of new books.
At the Providence Zoo and Indian Stream Republic (Poets.org)
Two poems that appeared in Poetry magazine recently and not-so recently, both inspired by time spent with Jessie’s family in New England locales: At the Providence Zoo and Indian Stream Republic.
February 18, 2014
On George Eliot and Rebecca Mead
A beautifully compact, and not at all ironic, bio-homage to an author whose wisdom was real: George Eliot knew, if anyone knew, how many things can be so complicated.
On the New Yorker site, on William T. Vollman
“Yet perhaps Dolores was not infinitely malleable, infinitely subject to Vollman’s will after all.”
February 14, 2014
First Readings: Rae Armantrout’s Spin (Jacket)
As part of Jacket’s First Readings series, I respond to Rae Armantrout’s Spin.
January 4, 2014
Believer: on Deborah Woodard
I’m in The Believer several times each year as a Contributing Reviewer. This month (Jan/ ’14) I review a neat book of mostly-prose partly-narrative and certainly groundbreaking poems by Deborah Woodard.
My thanks to Brandon Shimoda for bringing her book to my attention some number of months ago!
Interview with Monica Youn at Boston Review
I’ve been a fan of Monica Youn and of Monica Youn’s poetry since 1994; it’s a pleasure like none other to say that she asked some great questions, and I tried to answer them, in a recent online segment for Boston Review. The piece comes with “Three Stephanies,” that is, three new poems.
NYTBROMG
The last New York Times Book Review of 2013 included a rather nice review of Belmont from Major Jackson, along with Jackson’s coverage of Kwame Dawes, Mei-Mei Bersenbrugge and Averill Curdy: “ This prodigiously gifted critic… complicates the suburbs we know… by suggesting the way out of malaise is to celebrate residents’ liberating desires and obsessions, not least his own.”
“Both the person I am and the people whom I would like to be”
I think I have finally figured out the most important things I want to say about the intersection of the big topics “being trans” (or “being a girl inside”) and “writing poetry”: they’re here, in a long review for the Los Angeles Review of Books (thanks, LARB!) of the important anthology troubling the line. It appeared in late 2013. Let me know what you think. I’ve been delighted so far by the feedback on this one too.
