All About You: Review of Sky Burial, Interview with Rachel Zucker, and Other News
This morning my review of Dana Levin’s Sky Burial went up on The Rumpus. Check it out! Dana Levin is one of my favorite poets, and this fierce new book is definitely worth a read. Then buy her other books, Wedding Day and In the Surgical Theatre.
Victoria Chang interviews another one of my favorite poets, Rachel Zucker, on her blog. Thanks Victoria!
C. Dale Young had two poems up on Poetry Daily. You know, C. Dale’s poems always surprise me with their spirituality. He makes me remember my own spiritual side, which I don’t address very often in writing.
Oliver de la Paz has an interview up on the Ploughshares Blog.
And yet another favorite poet, Matthea Harvey, won a big old award.
Ever wonder what the Vida count would look like for sci fi? Wonder no more.
Kelli’s kicking off another grand poetry giveaway!
Today is a celebration of you guys and all your hard work!
I’ve been inspired to post this article I wrote, “The Bad Wives Club,” by several things:
—This story about a journalist who ran her own piece after it was accepted, then killed.
–The recent discussion about Zucker’s newest book, Museum of Accidents, by Stephen Burt and others on a variety of blogs, focusing on her poetry about motherhood.
I wrote this article last year about Rachel Zucker’s The Bad Wife Handbook and Beth Ann Fennelly’s Unmentionables. I really loved both books and thought that they had something important to say. The article was accepted by a well-paying org, then killed.
Here is a teaser. Click on the link at the end for the full article.
“If we were to plot out the trajectory of American women’s poetry on wife-hood, from Anne Bradstreet to Sylvia Plath to Louise Gluck to Rachel Zucker, what would that look like? Even the word “wife” seems freighted with connotations of motherhood, domestic chores and duty. What does it mean for a woman to be a wife in contemporary society? How can one be a “good” or “bad” wife? These are some of the questions posed to a contemporary reader in Rachel Zucker’s The Bad Wife Handbook and Beth Ann Fennelly’s Unmentionables.
Zucker and Fennelly question the guilt and the societal expectations in an unmerciful, sometimes piercing light. Can a contemporary woman keep her individuality, her art, her erotic self, alive in the face of the expectations of being a “good” wife, a “good” mother? What do those words even mean?
The two poets use different syntactical strategies while addressing similar subjects – Fennelly’s poems simmer and stir, bursting out of their narrative structures to include as much of her inner turmoil and messy, robust sexuality as possible, while Zucker’s tease and bemuse with their constant shimmying of pronouns, subjects and verb tenses.”
Rest of article here.
(If you like it, help support a poet – consider ordering my book or asking your local library to carry it. Thanks!)