In April 2021, seeking motivation during the pandemic, Jennifer Martelli, Cindy Veach, and I started a poem-a-day challenge. Inspired by Diane Seuss and Terrance Hayes, we crafted 30 American Sonnets. Remarkably, we all stumbled upon a peculiar news story of a woman swallowed by a python in Taiwan. Each of us penned a poem based on this bizarre event.
January Gill O'Neil on "Woman Swallowed by a Python in Her Cornfield" |
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"Chang thrives at embodying and vocalizing universal feelings of anxiety, joy, grief, fear, and wonder. Further, it’s as if readers of her poetry are invited to visit a theater designed to accommodate a form or tradition with which she is obsessed, like the elegy, the letter, the prose poem. Reading her work chronologically, I was struck by how the personae adopted in Chang’s earlier books peel away gradually, such that the feelings animating her new poems are closer to the surface and more discernible to the reader."
via POETS & WRITERS |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Bret Shepard on "Here But Elsewhere"
"The landscape of my childhood comes back in moments where I confront change....What I experience now pulls on the wild things I experienced earlier in life. The gravel runway for airplanes along the tundra of Atqasuk. The snow piled by machine into a temporary mountain near Ipalook Elementary in Utqiagvik. The sea ice breaking up near the shore of Browerville in time for whaling season." |
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