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Mycocosmic and plutonic
Big news arrived this week: Wednesday morning, I talked by phone with Jeffrey Levine, who told me that Diane Seuss had named my next poetry book, Mycocosmic, runner-up for the Dorset Prize, and they want to publish it with a $1000 honorarium, likely in winter 2025. I said yes. I’m still stunned. My adoration for…
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Word-feast
If you have some quiet hours this week, I hope you’ll read the amazing poems in the new issue of Shenandoah. Hot-flashing in your Thanksgiving kitchen? Ann Hudson has you covered. Missing green horizons? Look at Oliver de la Paz’s Diaspora Sonnets. Craving something funny-dark? See Kelli Russell Agodon and Julie Marie Wade. Want a…
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Book birthday and other shenanigans
Happy 6-month birthday, little book. Thanks to all the friends who sent and posted these baby and launch portraits, and to the reviewers, personal-note-writers, and quiet book-buyers. I feel guilty that chairing my department has slowed down my promotion efforts, so as always, if you have suggestions for events or other ways of getting the…
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Electing another trajectory
I’ve known since childhood that to many people, I’m not a full person, but I can’t pinpoint the moment I grasped it. Sexual assaults in college and high school were strong messages that my body didn’t belong to me. In a middle school class debate, a teacher required me to argue AGAINST the Equal Rights…
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Pretending the house is clean
It’s my mother’s birthday tomorrow, February 7th, so I spent some time this morning looking at photos. She always looked happy holding a baby–that’s me, beginning the lifelong practice of talking with my hands–although I really like the one, too, of the mid-60s records spread out on the floor. The classroom pictured above is one…
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Literary sources and afterlives
“Extended Release,” now in Guernica, is one of those poems that came to me in a rush, the kind that writers sometimes refer to as a gift, in that it arrives in near-final shape. I jotted in a dim living room during my mother’s last weeks, when she was in and out of hospitals and…
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Shenandoah, #DisConIII, biobreaks
During the last few weeks, I spent 20+ hours reading and ranking national student Fulbright applications in Creative Writing so I could meet with two other jurists and wrangle amicably over the best ones to send up the decision chain. It was interesting work but EXHAUSTING and very hard to accomplish at such a busy…
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Rhyme. Activism. Speculation. Revision. Pumpkins.
I still don’t have exact dates for my forthcoming essay collection, Poetry’s Possible Worlds, but I can see the light in the distance now. I’m STOKED to have a version of the Introduction appearing in the new American Poetry Review, where lots of people will see it. I just finished revising the whole ms according…
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Dream, river, poetic convergences
My dream-life has been off-the-scale intense, populated by strangers demanding I change my life. The tarot spreads of my daily meditations keep saying so, too–that I’m feeling a call and soon to walk away from something but resisting change so far. I must have carried that energy to Harpers Ferry this weekend, when my spouse…
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Teaching guide for “A Grimoire” in Shenandoah 70.2
The Slightly-Later-Than-Spring 2021 issue of Shenandoah is live! I curated a themed section called “A Grimoire: Poems in Pursuit of Transformation.” My editorial note describes what I mean by “uncanny activism,” but in short, these are poems that try to make things happen, often by using the features of spells, prayers, charms, and other petitions…
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LESLEY WHEELER 