Energetic valor. Temperature and texture. Power, emergency, and reclamation. Across my poetry and sculpture practices, my preoccupations have been consistent. This poem opens my first book, and it is part-memo, part-invocation. It was the last one written for the manuscript. Happily, my soul titled this poem for me. It colors our endeavors, as she bade me speak.
Sara Ellen Fowler on "Good Mare" |
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"I Would Follow This Poem to Hell and Back"
Critic A.O. Scott marvels at Gwendolyn Brooks: "Here’s a poem about patience, about self-control, about the need to conserve your energy and constrain your desire. Fittingly enough, it’s a proper old-school sonnet, orderly and elegant: 14 lines of iambic pentameter, crisply punctuated, with syllables cut to measure....This poem is also the opposite of everything I’ve just described. It’s as wild a piece of verse as you’ll ever read, seething and unruly in spite of its ostensibly sensible theme and painstakingly precise decorum. A sonnet at war with itself."
via THE NEW YORK TIMES |
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What Sparks Poetry: Matthew Cooperman on Reading Prose
"How will we spend our days? How will we attend to our rapidly accelerating planet? One habit of response is to read bracing prose, and for me, it’s often “the consolations of philosophy,” to quote an excellent recent example by Alain de Botton. From the Affective Turn to the Queering of Nature, Object Oriented Ontology to Anthropocene Studies, there’s an incredible florescence of philosophical writing going on internationally, as if climate change has triggered all our cells to wake up." |
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