LESLEY WHEELER

Author: Lesley Wheeler

  • Virtual Salon #6 with Elizabeth Savage & Ann E. Michael

    Featured at today’s virtual salon are two lovely new chapbooks, a brand new one from blogger-extraordinaire Ann E. Michael and one from late 2019 by Kestrel Poetry Editor Elizabeth Savage. Both are poets whom I’ve admired for ages. If this were a live reading, you’d also immediately perceive that they are exceptionally kind and generous…

  • The generosity of writers in Crisis

    Just a quick note from my hermit’s retreat: I am so impressed by the gallantry of writers, editors, and reading series organizers, so many of whom are ingeniously making the show go on. I wrote last time about hitches in publication pipelines, but for authors who had reached the culmination of years of work and…

  • Looking off cliffs

    I’m not processing very well, here at the quiet edge of apocalypse. Sometimes I’m fine, scared, down, or stir-crazy; often I’m busy teaching remotely, being fortunate enough to still have a job; generally I can’t concentrate. New York City has always been the center of the world for me; how will it fare? When will…

  • Virtual Poetry Salon #5 with Caroline Cabrera

    And even in blindness our chemistries communicate. Our instinct, a lace mycelium. When my cheeks go hot and I distrust a man I may be sensing the hair as it rises from another woman’s neck. I may smell her experience. We know more than we trust ourselves to know. -Caroline Cabrera, from “The body gives…

  • Virtual Salon #4 with Elizabeth Hazen

    We’ve been called so many things that we are not, we startle at the sound of our own names. -Elizabeth Hazen, from “Devices” I’ll be teaching a virtual Whitman and Dickinson course in our May term, and because it may be pass/ fail only, it’s especially urgent to come up with assignments my undergraduates will…

  • Virtual Salon #3 with Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers

    There’s one scar a river carved, but this ground isn’t a bible you know. True, there are chapters of basalt and clay, but no leaves get saved between them. -from “Amazonis, Mars” The Tilt Torn Away from the Seasons by Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers documents a different crisis than the one we’re currently, ineffectively navigating: people…

  • Virtual Salon #2 with William Woolfitt

    The season of cracking open, bloodroot, egg strings. My grandmother chops the cloddy ground. Many years without him. Onion sets, new moon peas.  from “Chorus Frog” by William Woolfitt It’s alarming to watch Netflix now: all those strangers in unconcerned proximity, sharing bread, shaking hands! Poor hygiene is not, I suspect, what those directors wanted…

  • the salonnière introduces …the state she’s in!

    My book is now available from Tinderbox Editions! And, once we get through this, it will also be available in independent bookstores near you. In the meantime, I hereby introduce a virtual salon for authors launching poetry books plus anyone who enjoys a pretend party. Imagine this space as a high-ceilinged room, art-fans lounging on…

  • Virtual launches and figuring out how to help

    When my students asked me last week–during our final in-person classes, as it turns out–how I thought the virus would develop or whether W&L would switch to online instruction soon, I offered guesses with the caveat, “But I’m not an authority on this. My thoughts about poetry are worth something; otherwise I’m just an average…

  • #Virtualbookfair, disappointment, little gifts

    This week has been a bummer. I voted for Elizabeth Warren, whom I love love love but who did poorly across the country in Super Tuesday. It’s been clear for many weeks that she wasn’t going to win, so I’m more resigned than some to this country being a sexist retrograde mess, but still… I’m…