2010 poetry alum Laura Van Prooyen was recently featured in the LEON Literary Review. Read an excerpt of “A Year Like None Other” below:

A Year Like None Other

That year all elective surgeries were cancelled, and I
was the only patient. Once my appendix was gone,
my abdomen cleared of the spill, I was neither
sick nor well. Recovering, but alone.

Because we are all in danger
of what we cannot see:  no visitors. A nurse
to help me shower, to check bandages when I pressed
the button to be seen.

I can move these days without fear in the company of scars.

Read this poem in its entirety here: http://leonliteraryreview.com/issue-10-laura-van-prooyen/

2020 poetry alum Margaret Ray was recently featured in the LEON Literary Review. Read an excerpt of “Along for the Ride” below:

Along for the Ride

Sweet Fears  don’t worry
the windshield wipers work  see
those flakes in the air
don’t worry  they’re going
somewhere melted  melting
and our view will be clear 
Look at this exit before us
we don’t have to stay
on this grief highway forever
look turn just slightly
and we can pull over for snacks…

Read this poem in its entirety, as well as two others, here: http://leonliteraryreview.com/issue-10-margaret-ray/

2004 poetry alum Colleen Abel was recently featured in the LEON Literary Review. Read an excerpt of “Lament with Six Stitches” below:

Lament with Six Stitches

Everyone who looks at you sees
my face in your face

but this is a part of you I do not know:
one of the only parts, this inside of your skin, 

many layers down, flanged with white 
and pulpy-red, exactly as a split fruit.

Less than I ever do I see myself in you now—
blood trail down your shirt, the hole gaping 

between your eyes—I, who am so careful,
who only came close once to slipping

out from this world’s grasp: the day you 
came into it, a noose around your neck

that almost killed us both. And here 
we are again. 

Read this poem in its entirety, as well as another, here: http://leonliteraryreview.com/issue-10-colleen-abel/

2019 poetry alum Charles Douthat was recently featured in the LEON Literary Review. Read an excerpt of “Grounds” below:

Grounds

And after draining water pipes for winter
and latching shutters closed, after strapping
suitcases to the station wagon’s rack
and taking up a basement shovel 

I’d dig a foot-deep, yard-wide earth-hole 
downhill from our two-room mountain cabin,
then wait for my father and the grease-soaked
brown-paper bag of kitchen leavings

he’d carry down.  Ceremoniously
he would nod, release the uplifted bag,
and we’d watch it strike dirt and split apart,
spewing out meat gristle and banana peels,

chicken bones and eggshells. . . 

Read this poem in its entirety here: http://leonliteraryreview.com/issue-10-charles-douthat/

Program founder and poetry faculty member Ellen Bryant Voigt was recently featured in Poetry Daily. Read an excerpt of Martin Mitchell’s reflection below:

Martin Mitchell on Ellen Bryant Voigt’s Messenger

In the first months of the pandemic, I found myself living in a borrowed house, beautiful and light-filled, with large granite countertops—a stately old structure ideally located near the center of a quaint, gothic city. Perfect for afternoon walks and evening drinks on the upstairs patio. Each night I would listen as the oak trees slowly filled with bird song and marvel at the languid persistence of the Spanish moss, glowing dimly above the lamp posts.

All I missed, really, besides friends and family, was my book collection, 500 miles and three states away. The house, having been renovated for weekend vacationers, had nothing in the way of reading material except for brochures of nearby tourist attractions. So, I ordered a few books from a local store.

It was in this way that I first encountered Ellen Bryant Voigt’s Messenger: New and Selected Poems 1976-2006, a book that has anchored me amid the tumultuous uncertainty of the past eighteen months. Voigt’s poems are shorn of superfluity, each line shaved down to its essential, burning core. She is a poet of control and precision; across decades and amid differing poetical movements, Voigt is steadfast in her adherence to a clear-eyed iambic elegy…

Read the rest of this essay, as well as a poem of Voigt’s, here: https://poems.com/features/what-sparks-poetry/martin-mitchell-on-ellen-bryant-voigts-messenger/