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Virtual Poetry Salon with Tess Taylor
I’ve always liked fierce poems and feminist poems, but it wasn’t that long ago that I noticed how many of the poetry collections I like best are deeply grounded in place. In Tess Taylor’s new collection, Rift Zone, that place is California in a century perched on a fault line. Taylor writes of suburbs that…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
LESLEY WHEELER 