Current and Forthcoming Issues

2008 is picking up. "Siren" appears in the new issue of The Warwick Review, and poems will appear later this year in Poetry Wales, The Rialto, Salamander, Shearsman, Stand, and TLS.

Uncollected Poems: 1993

Resuming my series of older poems I still like that won't make it into a book--

Sacred Ground

It was an afternoon in the week before Easter.
The nuns at St. Clare Elementary had released
us to our families in the name of the resurrection.
That was when everything came down:
a barn and two houses were leveled at the edge of town
while surrounding winds took trees,

cars, a stray dog, and a wandering girl as temporary hostages.
When they were returned to earth ,
they were changed--
they kept some of the twisting air inside of them
as if it were part of the ransom.

These were the trees that trembled
when there was no breeze,
their leaves swaying like slowly waving hands.
The cars had a whistle inside them
that no mechanic could explain.

The dog was a midnight dervish,
his mouth would not foam nor his eyes glaze,
but some nights when the prairie was still
but for the distant murmur of truck or train,
he would idle down the center line of Hovey Avenue
to writhe and undulate
to a sensual, frenzied music
we could not hear.

The girl floated down our street, a yellow leaf
suspended in the air, descending or ascending
but never quite touching the ground.
She rounded the corner of our lot
and thus had to have passed our shed
with its backplot of the burials of family pets.
She passed the makeshift graves,

and so our burial ground was consecrated by her passing,
our half-angel, half-girl,
the wind fluttering in her chest
with the singing deep in the earth
of what has lived and died,
or aloft, the spirits yet to descend,
hovering in the living air.

written 2 April 1993
published in Zone 3

One Story

I love the short story, and I've recently come upon a magazine that delivers excellent work in the genre, One Story. Each issue is a single story of 3,000-8,000 words, and a new issue comes out every three weeks. I've only read two issues/stories, and both were excellent: Nicole Kelby's "Jubilation, Florida" and Amelia Kahaney's "Fire Season." Also to the editors' credit is that they never use the same author's work twice. I'm tempted to subscribe to it from my parents' address. Check out the website for excerpts, interviews with authors, etc.

Wikipedia

Someone has composed a Wikipedia entry for me and was just in touch to see if I wanted to add anything. Any ideas?

The Good Doctor by Damon Galgut

Every so often, in spite of my knowledge of the books on my shelves that I haven't read, I let my eyes skim over the spines in the Dorothy House charity shop in Bradford on Avon's Shambles. Lately, I've been wanting to read more fiction, and two days ago I pulled off my shelves The Good Doctor, which I bought last summer, I think, at Dorothy House.

It's a short novel, a mere 215 pages, and the eloquence of the writing has me past the halfway point already, though I have only let myself read it when I can't get anything else done (i.e. on the bus, just before bed). Only by looking up reviews online did I learn it was longlisted for the Booker in 2003; if you click on the title for this post, it'll take you to the review at The Guardian. Though The Good Doctor is anything but a "happy book," I'll be sorry when I finish it.

My youngest niece

Joslynn Bella Casperson, seven months old
(click on the picture for a larger one,
that shows even better how cute she is)

Bush vetoes interrogation limits

Are we surprised? Sadly, no.

Mary Jo Bang's Elegy Wins National Book Critics Circle Prize for Poetry

I'm delighted that this wonderful book has won. I recently submitted my review of it to TLS and expect it to appear shortly.

"Accounts" and other prose poems

Some weeks ago Ian Seed asked me to submit some work for his magazine Shadowtrain, and the selected prose poems are now online in issue 22.

Yet in the world

It's in the world and available directly from Leafe Press. The publisher's splendid description of it is here.