Category: Poetry
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Assembling a Woman and Letting Go: Review of Maeve Fox’s “Letting Go of Me”
Maeve Fox’s poems show how through the act of “Letting Go,” we become. In her collection of poems Letting Go of Me, published in April 2025 by Redhawk Publications, Maeve Fox braids together past and present, and though the cover says written by both “John Fox” and “Maeve Fox,” a single voice of loving the… Read more
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Howl Into Poetry Month with Narya Rose Deckard’s Wolfcraft
I’ve just sent out a press release! Here it is: Kick off the first day of Poetry Month with Narya Rose Deckard at her book launch! Her first collection of poetry Wolfcraft will debut locally at Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse in downtown Hickory on April 1 at 6:15 PM. The event is free and open… Read more
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We Still Read (Medieval Poetry): Gawain’s Failure as Success
Last year I assigned my college composition class to read the medieval Romance poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (“GGK”). I had spent time studying it over the past year, and, with the help of the book Approaches to Teaching Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, I couched the reading of it within the… Read more
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Dogmagic Poetry: Hiking Sketches, August 2024
Feeling washed out as the footbridge across Hoyle Creek Tributary. Its sand banks are slippery and soft, so the dog and I inch down to cross the slow flow that had just recently flooded. Mushrooms dot the forest floor from recent rain, all colors of them: white, orange, rust, yellow, red. The white ones are… Read more
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Night Locks the Birds in the Sky: Review of Bird Ornaments
How many ways can we come to know the body through metaphor? In Angel T. Dionne’s book of poems Bird Ornaments, it can be and become so many things: a “dimensional graph/of genetic variations,” string beans for arms, caterpillars for eyebrows, teeth become adversaries. And usually when we think of metaphors, we imagine them opening… Read more
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the story of abundance and loss: The Season of Coming and Going with Tarot: Days 23 & 24
Card for the 23rd: The Queen of Pentacles reversed Card for the 24th: 5 of cups Snow fall in western Maryland on this eve of Christmas. I take Losi out first thing in the gray-blue light of late winter dawn and she bounds through the freshly fallen snow. I wonder at her wonder, how most… Read more
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Epiphany: A Season of Coming and Going with Tarot: Day 22
The Eight of Swords reversed: a revelation, however small A woman stands with arms bound and eyes covered. She’s in a pretty helpless position, emphasized by the seeming jail of swords keeping her trapped on this island of emotional turmoil she stands upon. Water lies dark all around her, reflecting a dark sky. If upright… Read more
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I Keep Alive by Holding Still: The Season of Coming and Going with Tarot: Day 21
Card of the day: Four of Pentacles In this season of coming and going, I keep alive by holding still. Guard your stillness and your quiet as the man in the Four of Pentacles guards coins. Today is the day of most coming and most going: The dark has come, the light gone, and in… Read more
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The Naked Woods: The Season of Coming and Going with Tarot: Day 20
Tarot card of the day: Nine of Cups Today, on the day before darkest day, in this midwinter season, I want to think about contentment in absence. John O’Donohue meditates a great deal on absence in Eternal Echoes. He says it is sisters with presence: “the opposite of presence is not absence, but vacancy; where… Read more
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The Crypsis Leopard: The Season of Coming and Going with Tarot Day 19
Today’s Tarot card: Ten of Swords reversed (a second time) (photo from Oak and Grist Distilling Co. before the Dark City Poets Society open mic) A poem for today’s card: Pulmonarius mushrooms colonize a tree, actively break it down, transform it. Which, to a point, is like breath. Is that what transformation is, feathers of… Read more