Tag: poetry
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Honoring Stories, Honoring Our Humanity: Thinking About Close Reading
Oh, dreaded high school English class. Where Mrs. ——— beats social truths out of poems and stories, and clenches the narratives in her fists to wring out all meaning. We are a species driven to find it. We poke lines of poems until their bruised, we prod paragraphs until their quaking, drenched in sweat, and Read more
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Brave Enough to Admit We’re Lost: Finding Self to Find Community
In early 2025 I had the privilege of hearing Clint Bowman read from his new book of poems, If Lost, at Poetry Hickory, a monthly poetry reading with featured poet followed by an open mic. Bowman explained he organized his book as a sort of guide for someone lost, with three sections that act as Read more
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Earthed by Light: Response to Sylee Gore’s chapbook Maximum Summer
Despite the heat in Sylee Gore’s chapbook of poems Maximum Summer, the book holds a cold dark, the baby being fitted with clothes knitted while the speaker is on commute, always the breeze pushes leaves of the sycamore, blue light is a cool light, and the images in her poems only expose flashes of life Read more
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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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From Dormant Roots to Dragonfire: Writing the Self
One of the most important experiences I had in my MFA was writing a poem. Here’s what happened:My teacher told us to go outside sometime that week and read Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind.” She said this poem was meant to be read aloud…. loudly.Yell it.Yell the poem as loud as you Read more