A poem by alum Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet (poetry, ’05) appears at Blackbird:
Six Explanations for Migraine
1 Demon
Flashing like lightning it is loosed
above and below. Weather, wind
enters through the eye, row
of trees along the road. Like one
sick of heart he staggers, like one
bereft of reason he is broken.
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A poem by alum Francine Conley (poetry, ’14) appears at The American Literary Review:
Who Are You?
I am in something like sleep
inside a borrowed room
and I wake to a field
outside my window
where a horse appears
grazing on prairie grass,
brown muscles
undulating
in spools of sun.
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An interview with alum Alicia Jo Rabins (poetry, ’09) appears at The Collagist:
“No One Can Give You What You Take from Yourself” and “Home Birth Videos” have some thematic similarities. Can you tell me a little bit about the origins of these poems?
Last summer, I was pregnant with my second child. He was due July 31, and I decided to write a poem a day throughout the month of July, to trace this heightened and strange time with words. There is a psychedelic stillness in the last weeks before a baby is born, when you literally embody the term “pregnant pause.” Both these poems come out of that moment and that series…full of birthing imagery, energy, and thoughts.
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Two poems by alum Matthew Olzmann (poetry, ’09) appear at Drunken Boat:
The Millihelen
Unit for measuring beauty. One millihelen is the amount of beauty
that will launch exactly one ship. (from urbandictionary.com)
Everyone knows about the beauty that launches
a thousand ships. Her hair unfurls like a flag
and the navy, enflamed, will follow that flag until
everyone is dead. There is power in that. We know.
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Five poems by alum Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr. (poetry, ’09) appear at Drunken Boat:
In Spare Relief
The dead ones are the pretty ones, said Lily,
with space, quiet, the occasional guide or guard, their gods
graceful and monochrome in niche
or in this narrative band of soft stone
all pavilion and demons, as in the poems.
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Alum Laura Van Prooyen (poetry, ’10) provided a poem and commentary for Poetry Daily’s Poet’s Pick. Her chosen poem is “Holy Sonnet: XIV” by John Donne.
“Having grown up in a Dutch Calvinist home, the literature of my childhood was scripture. Every night at the dinner table, my mother read Bible stories of journeys, plagues, and trials, meant to inspire and instruct. The Psalms, many of which I was required to memorize, were my first poems. Language and rhythm got into my blood. However, the rigid parameters of my religious tradition and my family’s commitment to them prompted in me a battle. I felt constrained by narrow interpretations of Right and Wrong and grew to be an irritating thorn, poking: What if? Donne’s restless, searching energy in “Holy Sonnet: XIV” has become, for me, a new psalm. I am drawn to the music of doubt and discontent, to the deep-rooted struggle with faith. I understand the speaker’s impulse to implore a triune God to alter, forcefully, his soul.”
You can read the rest of Laura’s commentary (and the poem) online…
A story by alum Alain Park (fiction, ’13) appears at Four Way Review:
A woman stands alone in the surf. She’s up to her mid-thighs in the water, warm Gulf of Mexico water, and she can feel the strong undertow of the sea. It pulls her legs and sucks the sand from under her feet. It’s tremendous—this undertow—a force of nature—powerful. But, she’s determined to stand in it. So, she does.
She’s not entirely alone. Her lover is near, standing behind her on the dry sand, holding a bag of beach supplies. She calls for him to come to her and though at first he doesn’t move, eventually, after she throws him a stare, he does. He might be a boyfriend—most would describe him as such—but that sounds too serious for the woman so she says lover, even though they’ve been in each other’s lives for years. It’s okay to say lover, since it’s been off and on. This is what she tells herself.
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A poem by alum Jennifer Sperry Steinorth (poetry, ’15) appears at Four Way Review:
Water and Island
pressed between blue pages a few hours
on our old boat which is not ours my leg
over the bow you in the stern with the kids
in the stern I’m reading poems you’re not
the sky a depression of noon wilting
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Two poems by alum Jennifer Givhan (poetry, ’15) appear at Four Way Review:
NOCTURNE
Then I remembered: Mama wasn’t gone but safe, in her bed, turning in sleep. It was I who went away—from Chopin in the bones, palms heavy with dates like dark purple fingers reaching toward sand, toward fruit sickly sweet outside Mama’s bedroom window turned mine, her girlhood unloosed in mine, on the ground, rotting yellow.
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An interview with alum Serene Taleb-Agha (fiction, ’12) appears at the website of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College:
You studied engineering at Berkeley, correct? As you pursued a degree in the sciences, were you drawn at the same time to literature? Or did writing come later? Are they (engineering and MFA) mutually exclusive to you, or did you find a place where the two meet?
I have always loved books and literature. As a kid, reading was practically a matter of survival. I remember writing my first adventure stories at the age of ten, and I kept a journal and a suite of pen pals for years until school, and then work, took over my life. But I also had this logical, analytical side that really enjoyed science and engineering. So while I’ve turned away from it as a career, figuring out how the interlocking pieces of the universe fit and come together has always been a big part of my thinking. The struggle to figure out the world we’re born in, even while there’s all this ordinary drama complicating our lives—that fascinates me.
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