In June, poet Anne Overstreet published her first collection of poems, entitled Delicate Machinery Suspended: Poems. It is about memory and faith, affection and love, work done and work done well, and even playfulness. The poems are about a life observed, but also a life to come. It’s a beautiful work.
The Cinnamon Beetle 5
Below are five poems and five fragments pulled from our recent Twitter poetry party.
The Cinnamon Beetle 4
Our recent Twitter poetry party swirled around oceans and ashes, a drive down side roads, the telephone and how something as mundane as burning the toast becomes something else again.
The Cinnamon Beetle 3
We now have an additional seven poems from our recent Twitter poetry party.
The Cinnamon Beetle 2
Below are an additional five poems from our recent Twitter poetry party.
The Cinnamon Beetle
Somehow, Legos, cinnamon beetles, tattoos and open windows became the focus of the early part of our Twitter poetry party.
Alice and the Chinese Jar 5
Below are the final five poems from the recent Twitter poetry party.
Anne Overstreet’s “Delicate Machinery Suspended”
This collection, Overstreet’s first, displays a command of language, style and content that is deeply affecting. You are watching a series of scenes filmed with the eye of an artist.
Alice and the Chinese Jar 4
Something unusual happened with this group during the Twitter poetry party; you’ll see it in the last two poems.
John Estes Poetry Readings
In May, we reviewed Kingdom Come: Poems by John Estes here at TweetSpeak. He’s a fine poet, and we’re rather enthusiastic about his new collection. John is doing a reading tour. If you happen to be in Colorado, Kansas or Nebraska, you might have an opportunity to hear him read from Kingdom Comes. Here’s the […]
Alice and the Chinese Jar 3
Below are three additional poems from the recent Twitter poetry party.
Alice and the Chinese Jar 2
We have three more poems from the recent Twitter poetry party.
Alice and the Chinese Jar
Last Thursday night, there was another gathering of the Tweetspeakers for a Twitter poetry party.
Angela Alaimo O’Donnell’s “Saint Sinatra”
St. Sinatra is a collection that is at once serious and humorous, focused and yet playful. It speaks to and about saints who are both familiar and known for being saints as well as those who are not.
Nick Samaras’ “Hands of the Saddlemaker”
Nicholas Samaras received the award in the 1991 for the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition for this volume of poetry, Hands of the Saddlemaker. Now 20 years old, it has aged well; its themes of exile, pilgrimage, separation and “in this world but not of it” are as current now as they were then, […]
Ava Leavall Haymon’s “Why the House is Made of Gingerbread: Poems”
When I was little, my mother would read stories to me from an oversized yet relatively thin edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. It had a green cloth cover, and I remember it specifically because I still have it. (It’s also decorated with writing in crayon, but that’s another story.) One of my favorite stories was […]
“Kingdom Come: Poems” by John Estes
In 2009, we reviewed here a chapbook published by poet John Estes entitled Breakfast with Blake at the Lacoon. In the review we said that Estes effectively evoked a sense of both the literary and everyday reality. That same characteristic is true of his first collection of poems, Kingdom Come: Poems, published by CR Press, […]
Cool Poetry Resources
Theron Kennedy at Inside Theron’s Head 2.0 and Maureen Doallas at Writing Without Paper found two cool online poetry resources. Kennedy tweeted a link to 32 Poems, which is sharing 215 favorite poetry books by 43 poets in 30 days. 32 Poems borrowed the idea from someone else, and adapted it for National Poetry Month. […]
National Poetry Month: Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens (1879 – 1955) was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and the New York Law School, and worked for most of his life as an attorney with the Hartford Insurance Company and its predecessors, and was a vice president at the time of his death. (He turned down a faculty position at […]
National Poetry Month: Billy Collins
Billy Collins has been called the most popular living poet in America, and with good reason: he’s been more than a little successful as a poet, which in some literary quarters is rather unforgiveable. Collins has been U.S. Poet Laureate twice (2001 and 2002) and New York Poet Laureate (2004); received fellowships for the National […]