Tag: meryl natchez

Q&A with Rebecca Foust: ‘Only’ & Communicating Across the Centuries

by Meryl Natchez

Posted on by Zack Ravas

I first met Rebecca Foust when we worked together for Marin Poetry Center starting in 2014. Foust is the author of seven poetry collections, including The Unexploded Ordnance Bin, Paradise Drive, All That Gorgeous Pitiless Song, and God, Seed. Her work has received the  2020 Pablo Neruda Award, the 2017 CP Cavafy Award,  and the 2016 James Hearst Poetry Prize, and was runner up for the 2022 Missouri Review Editor’s Prize. In 2017 she was appointed Marin County Poetry Laureate. I have been intrigued by her new book of poems, Only (Four Way Books 2022; 88 pages), a varied, tender, […]

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‘Why to These Rocks: Fifty Years of Poems from the Community of Writers’: In Touch With the World

by Meryl Natchez

Posted on by Zack Ravas

When I applied to the Community of Writers Poetry Workshop in 1987, I had no idea what I was letting myself in for, or that this unique summer program would become my poetry home. I had just read The Gold Cell, and saw an ad in Poetry Flash that mentioned Sharon Olds was teaching at the workshop. I blush to say that I’d never heard of Galway Kinnell or Robert Hass at that period of my life; with four children and full-time work, I was out of touch with the world of poetry. When I arrived in Olympic Valley that […]

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‘Catwalk’ by Meryl Natchez: Sorrow as a Matter of Perspective

by Rebecca Foust

Posted on by Zack Ravas

 “Time is the school in which we learn, / Time is the fire in which we burn.”  Robert Frost believed a book of poetry should itself be structured as a poem, with individual poems functioning the way stanzas and lines do to create a beginning, middle, and end, or some other pattern that alchemizes the book into its own artistically complete and synergistic whole. In Catwalk (99 pages; Longship Press), Meryl Natchez’s meticulously structured and sequenced new book, the placement of every poem feels right and the result of a considered decision. That is, the poems are rooted in context in an […]

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‘The Tradition’ by Jericho Brown: Bursts of Ecstasy and Longing

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Posted on by Zack Ravas

To some extent, every poet creates a persona. Think of Berryman’s Henry, for example. But Jericho Brown has done so more fully and convincingly than most. Born Nelson Dimery III, he answered to the name Jericho in a dream. In that dream the name allowed him go through a door. He later learned that the loose translation of the name is “defense,” and he discarded his birth name and became the unmistakably singular poet Jericho Brown. In the same way, he has transformed his evangelical fundamentalist upbringing into spirituality, physicality, and song. This transformation is showcased in his latest book, […]

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A Blossom on a Chain Link Fence: ‘Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God’ by Tony Hoagland

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Posted on by editor

Tony Hoagland’s books probably have the most intriguing titles of any contemporary poet. The newest one, Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God (74 pages; Graywolf Press) follows hard on Recent Changes in the Vernacular, from Tres Chicas Books, out late last year. What Hoagland does better than any other poet is select the exact details to throw the cognitive dissonance inherent in contemporary American life into stark relief. Never sentimental, often fond, and always accurate, his lines cut through to the essence of experience. Yet they are leavened by tenderness and longing, a wry acceptance of the human condition. […]

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National Poetry Month: A Q&A with ‘I Know Your Kind’ author William Brewer

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Posted on by editor

It’s rare that any book of poems, not to mention a first book, is as powerful as I Know Your Kind (96 pages; Milkweed) by William Brewer. This book, rooted in the physical and spiritual landscape of West Virginia, tackles the opioid epidemic in verse. Focusing on the small town of Oceana (nicknamed Oxyana for the record number of overdoses there), Oceana acts as a stand-in for West Virginia as a whole, which has the highest OD rate in the country. The book is at once dreamlike and visceral, and the images in it draw on the beauty and pain […]

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