An essay by 2012 fiction alum Katie Runde was recently featured in Catapult. Read an excerpt of Runde’s essay below:

(Photo credit: Rebecca Sanabria)

Writing Your Little Stories in the Shadow of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop

By the time we moved to Iowa City seven years ago, my husband and I had lived in three cities in five years, where I’d held three different jobs, earned one MFA, and miscarried twice before our first daughter was born.

Read the rest of this essay here: https://catapult.co/dont-write-alone/stories/katie-runde-iowa-writers-workshop-iowa-city-field-of-dreams-mfa-motherhood-community

2015 poetry alum Rose Auslander was recently featured in the DMQ Review. Read an excerpt of Auslander’s poem below:

It’s Been Years Since They Crossed the Bridge

You have to cross the canal at Union. Or Third. No subway runs there & if you say where, no cab will go. If you see condos by the water, don’t go in. Hold your breath, dive back a few decades & listen for the note in the middle of the hum at the bottom. If you hear a pack of kids laughing, you’re getting close—keep your distance. Stick to the sidewalk. Slowly walk backward in time until you feel the sun too bright & the pavement too hot & you can’t bandage yourself in words….

 

Read this poem in its entirety here: https://www.dmqreview.com/auslanders22

Fiction alum Sue Mell was recently featured in the L’Esprit Literary Review. Read an excerpt of “Ordinary Details” below:

Ordinary Details

Here in Queens, 6:30 on a January morning, it’s still deep dark, streetlight glinting off the chrome and driver-side mirror of a station wagon parked across the street. Between the car and the white wrought iron fence of a neighbor’s yard a figure, in a hooded sweatshirt, passes. Even in silhouette, I can read the hands in pockets, the shoulders shrugged against the cold. His bobbing gait carries a determined, almost musical, rhythm, white spires and scrollwork seeming to unspool in rapid motion as he moves by. His outline blurs in the sheers, then disappears beyond the molding of my window frame. A moment captured in the sharpened contrast of LED; gone the soft orange halo of sodium light once so effectively portrayed in a tiny square etching made by a friend—a realist painter now long dead….

 

Read this piece in its entirety here: https://lespritliteraryreview.org/2022/04/13/ordinary-details/

2017 poetry alum Nomi Stone was recently featured in The Rumpus. Read an excerpt of “The Feeling Kept Growing” below:

The Feeling Kept Growing

Then, all the animals were Bearo & all
the boys, Gilly. A curly-horned
ram came over the hill: gently his snout
hurt into my morning. Algae at the lip
of the sea on my left, that green sear,
& fungus gloving the trees, while our kid
squawked in the pram, like he’d eaten
a happiness & wanted to roll it back
to share with the sea…

 

Read this poem in its entirety, as well as another, here: https://therumpus.net/2022/04/18/national-poetry-month-day-18-nomi-stone/

Love Poem Resisting the Neon Larvae of Headlines,” a poem by alum Shadab Zeest Hashimi, was recently featured in The Missing Slate. Read an excerpt below:

 

Love Poem Resisting the Neon Larvae of Headlines

The world, a baby tied to dynamite,
a butterfly perforated with poison
arrows, burdened with deception in bones.
We rise as emissaries to God, our
bodies blue with reason, three quarters
of the time, the rest, inked with florets…

Read this poem in its entirety here: https://themissingslate.com/uncategorized/love-poem-resisting-the-neon-larvae-of-headlines/

2004 poetry alum Mary Lou Buschi was recently featured in On the Seawall. Read an excerpt of Buschi’s poem below:

When Year After Year I Receive an Evite to a Party Where I Know No One, Not Even the Host

 

The first year I didn’t reply.

I thought about replying.

The first year I thought maybe I did know them and I should go to the party.

The second year, I RSVP-ed “Not Attending.”

But I looked hard at every name on the Evite.

I thought I recognized one name.

The second year I was sure there was no one I knew.

The host sent 3 reminders to reply.

The third year there were pictures included.

Some were group selfies. I thought I saw my ear in one.

I respond, “What a great party.”

 

Read this poem in its entirety, as well as another, here: https://www.ronslate.com/abecedarian-and-when-year-after-year-i-receive-an-evite-to-a-party-where-i-know-no-one-not-even-the-host/

 

Poetry alum and faculty member Daniel Tobin was recently featured in On the Seawall. Read an excerpt of “Hand,” a translation of Rilke, below:

Hand

after Rilke

 

Look at the little mouse

baffled and afraid

in the room, lying

for twenty heartbeats

in a hand, a person’s hand, one

held out freely, firmly,

to keep it safe.

 

Read the rest of this translation, and three others, here: https://www.ronslate.com/full-throttle-hand-we-when/

Poetry alum John Minczeski was recently featured in One Art. Read an excerpt of “In the Fifth Month of Lockdown I Plant Clematis” below:

In the Fifth Month of Lockdown I Plant Clematis

The shovel, striking a root, thunked
all the way down to my moist heart.

An acolyte, I knelt to bury the plant to its neck.
Blame me for trusting coincidence

more than fate. Hold me responsible
for rose thorns. The sloping yard hoards

the memory of past glaciers. Have I searched within
for the gravitational field that holds me here?

 

Read the rest of this poem, as well as two others, here: https://oneartpoetry.com/2022/04/10/three-poems-by-john-minczeski/

Poetry alum Chloe Martinez was recently featured in Beloit Poetry Journal and Palette Poetry. Read an excerpt of Chloe’s interview in Palette below:

Chloe Martinez, poet and scholar of South Asian religions, has a long-breathed relationship with the work of Mirabai, one of the earliest known women poets, who lived in north India in the late fifteenth/early sixteenth century. An ardent devotee of the god Krishna, Mirabai (or Mira) is also known as a Hindu saint. Chloe first encountered her song-poems in college and has been rereading and thinking about them ever since. Eventually, she also began to translate them from the original Braj Bhasa, an early form of Hindi—and to write her own poems influenced, in different ways at different times, by Mira’s.   

“By Mira,” Chloe tells me, “I should really say ‘Mira’: we don’t really know which poems were written by a historical person, since they were first sung and shared orally, then gradually written down over centuries. It’s nearly certainly true that other people wrote songs in Mira’s persona and signed the poems with her name… Nevertheless, there’s a corpus of poems that are widely known today as ‘Mira poems’ and that’s what I’ve drawn from in [my] translations.”

Read this interview in its entirety here: https://www.palettepoetry.com/2022/01/27/the-guest-21/

Nancy Mitchell (Poetry ’91) recently interviewed poetry faculty member Dana Levin for Plume. Read an excerpt of their conversation below:

 

A Conversation with Nancy Mitchell and Dana Levin

NM: The title of the book, Now Do You know Where You Are, is taken from lines in Deepstep Come Shining, by the late C.D. Wright. In the title poem, you hear this phrase as a call to WAKE UP, Get your bearingsHear the trees. What exactly was it about the momentary age of Trump that this call became an urgent command with a new ring of sound?

DL: It was uncanny, the way that phrase—now do you know where you are —ran through my head for months in the wake of the 2016 election. Wright had died at the start of that pivotal year, and it felt like visitation and instruction, hearing that phrase over and over post November. I think my book is driven by this call to wake up to where we are, as a nation, to where I am, as a poet, a citizen, a human—to not fall asleep to peril, which in America has to do with the fragility of our democratic processes and the rise to power of the country’s most violent, bigoted, and corrupt qualities; and peril in the self, where these corrupt qualities are harbored.

NM: This collection of poems chronicles a fervent quest to locate yourself in coordinates, the intersection where external forces meet history and placewhere the soul and the body pressed against and into one another.

DL: Yes, the need to get located was profound for me after Trump’s election. In 2017 I found myself traveling through concentric circles of change. I was readying to leave Santa Fe, NM after nineteen years, to move to Saint Louis, a place I knew very little about, beyond Hollywood movies and Michael Brown’s death in 2014 at the hands of police in nearby Ferguson, the protests his death had sparked. I felt as though I was about to move to the navel of the nation: Saint Louis, source of so many American gifts and grotesqueries. Trump’s election and the hostilities it condoned also made me deeply afraid, as a Jew—a feeling shocking and new to me, though familiar to so many. Intellectually, I’d always understood antisemitism as a threat, but in 2017 that threat stopped being purely conceptual for me. My assumption of personal liberty, which I had always had the privilege to imagine strong, began to fray. Of course, that assumption has always been an illusion, but the American mythos of personal freedom carried me along for a long time. It was startling to discover how much I had internalized that mythos: me, a woman, a Jew, a daughter of immigrants, a poet!

Read this conversation in its entirety here: https://plumepoetry.com/d-lev-messenger/