| Robert Pinsky's Jersey Rain (FSG, 2000) paces between
the complexities of opera and the intimacy of a string quartet. It is
this range that places the Pulitzer Prize winner among our greatest
living poets and translators. The Favorite Poem Project,
launched when he served as US Poet Laureate, continues to bring poetry
to the foreground of our culture. Click here to order: 
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 [For a printable version of this poem, please click here.] |
| Kathleen Wakefield's Notations on the Visible World (Anhinga Press, 2000) was selected by Judith Kitchen for the 1999 Anhinga Prize for Poetry. It is a solid and elegant debut. | Reconsidering the Rift
I am thinking about error and beauty I am thinking about antimony and grace I am telling our son which is the meat-eater, as I study his picture of the red-tailed hawk, as if considering the spectacular descent. I watch the two-faced leaves of the linden and
sassafras He is telling me it is the hawk who is
beautiful, and I see how it is, grace in the mouth of a child like
the lamb wrapped ©2000 Kathleen Wakefield |
| Peter Meinke's Zinc Fingers (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000) is collage of philosophy, love, nostalgia and optimism; it reminds us that one need not be a child to discover and to be in awe of the world. | A Meditation on You
and Wittgenstein
Wittgenstein never met you face to face a maxim hard to fathom Nevertheless the world's everything that is the
case he guessed logic lies in poetry's embrace for love or a dream of love curls at its
base An ounce of loneliness outweighs a
pound of lace:
©2000 Peter Meinke |
| Ana Menéndez is the author of In
Cuba I Was a German Shepherd (Grove/Atlantic, 2001), a New York Times Notable Book
selection, and Loving Che (Atlantic Monthly
Press, 2003), which Carlyn Kolker praised in the Washington Times as "a rich,
unpretentious book, with a series of lessons . . . on the power . . .
of memory . . ." By far one of the most daring voices of her
generation, Menéndez keeps her poems buried in the yard, but one
will surface now and again like a beautiful wild plant. Click here to order:  Click here to order:
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Lucky
You do not live on a floating island.
©2001 Ana Menéndez |
| Spencer Short "lifts his reader far above the dreary fields of subject matter," wrote U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins when he selected Short's debut collection, Tremolo (HarperCollins / Perennial, 2001), for the National Poetry Series. | Divine Hammer
The afterimage which is the image of God. its fallout to rearrange our landscape like a
new metaphysics, is that Plato had to make his in the morning: the cicadas keying up in their atonal pitch, the cicadas rending like a machine, (who doesn't love the sky torn open like a
letter?) at dusk, gulls colliding like atoms the light & broken glass we call separate & collide, which is the way we're driven to the impossible as if to destruction, as if to distraction. ©2001 Spencer Short |
| Mary Elizabeth Pérez was featured in American Poet, the journal of The Academy of American Poets. "I wander into syntax," she says of her unpredictable work. "Strictly Deliberate" originally appeared in Seneca Review. | Strictly Deliberate It shows me drenched. The language sweats. oratory. (True stories vary.) Branched petals are floating of rough-winged tongue, the narrowness of a nametag, humid Yet half-stapled till the last, One can say Orchid all one wants. ©2000 Mary Elizabeth Pérez |
| Silvia
Curbelo knows the subtleties of loss as intimately as a great
painter knows the shades of a particular color. W.S. Merwin called
the poetry in
The Secret History of Water (Anhinga
Press, 1997) "accomplished, daring, full of energy and
intelligence." Click here to order:
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The Secret History of
Water The body is a stone house the body pins you to the ground crowded with loss empty with longing the weight of the world falling through it the way a body falls fast asleep then suddenly awake deliberate in the way it sees you The body anchored in sleep suddenly lifted suddenly unfurled a crawlspace for wind for rain falling on a simple city street the clean map of your childhood with its hundred roads back to the leaky house the room where you first opened your eyes saying This is the place You are the one until I felt my hands wash over you and the glass of my desire break and spill water we could sink through |
| Stan Sanvel Rubin, writes Marvin Bell, "lifts the
tangible into the realm of the lyrical imagination without losing
it" His most recent poetry collection is Five Colors (Custom Words,
2004).
He is founding director of the Rainier
Writng Workshop low-residency MFA program at PLU in Tacoma, WA. Click here to order:  |
The Leap The void is just under our bodies, just under the net. —Charles Wright A man leaps from a burning building. His arms spread in the biting air. His fingers reach for the invisible which will not hold him and, as he fall, he imagines he sees himself standing on the ground, waiting. A man leaps from a burning building. His arms spread like wings and he finds this resemblance funny, a cliché brought to life in order, once more, to display his inadequacies. As he falls, he composes a list of the clichés that are now his life. A man leaps from a burning building. I have done this too often, he thinks, surrendering himself to what he knows isn't there, the mountain of silence that, just for an instant, sustains you. And, for that instant, he is sustained.
© 2002 Stan Sanvel Rubin
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