Seriously Well by Helge Torvund

February 12, 2024

Lately, I've experienced an uncommonly broad swath of intense emotions ranging from elation and infatuation to grief, frustration, and self-pity. The reasons...

A Brief Celebration of Heart of the Lonesome Galaxy by Kate Lucas

June 29, 2023

For June's Stanza Break, I shared the text of an event-specific essay poem with subscribers that was written in the form of a mini-lecture on poetics. The...

Books I Can't Review and other updates

May 20, 2023

When I sent my March piece on What the Chickadee Knows, I had planned to send another piece in April or early May. However, two other projects came up...

What the Chickadee Knows (Gijigijigaaneshiinh Gikendaan) by Margaret Noodin

March 20, 2023

Hello, I considered opening this with an in-depth comment on my absence (the last Stanza Break went up half a year ago), but suffice it to say that some...

Line Study of a Motel Clerk by Allison Pitinii Davis

July 7, 2022

Published in 2017 by a small publisher called Baobab Press, Line Study of a Motel Clerk went under my radar until recently. These tightly-crafted poems...

Two Anthologies of Russian Poetry

June 14, 2022

This year, two separate anthologies of Russian poetry were published by two independent presses that I admire a great deal. The first, Verses on the...

Stanza Break: April Update

$ · April 15, 2022

Apologies for not sending a paid subscriber update last month. Shortly after sending my thoughts on Lao Yang's Pee Poems, my grandfather passed away at 95...

Revolutionary Letters by Diane di Prima

April 12, 2022

I came to Diane di Prima's poems only recently. I started reading her selected poems, Pieces of a Song (City Lights, 1990) in early-May of 2020, and the...

Pee Poems by Lao Yang

March 16, 2022

Pee Poems by Lao Yang, translated by Joshua Edwards and Lynn Xu (Circumference Books, 2022) Lao Yang is likely better known outside of the U.S. as an artist...

Stanza Break: Some thoughts on lineage

$ · February 16, 2022

Thank you again for your patience as I transitioned Stanza Break to this new platform. It's been on my mind for some time, but I was concerned about how...

Immigrants in Our Own Land by Jimmy Santiago Baca

February 11, 2022

A note before we dive in: this month's dispatch is a bit late because I've spent the last week or so migrating this newsletter from Substack to a platform...

Stanza Break: Happy New Year!

$ · February 1, 2022

I spent some time at the beginning of the month finalizing my reading tracker for 2021, adding last minute books and taking a look at the data. Here are the...

Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959-1979

January 18, 2022

During the 1960’s and 1970’s, the costs of printing were declining, allowing books to be mass produced relatively cheaply. This led, among other things, to...

I Saw a Beautiful Woodpecker by Michał Skibiński

December 10, 2021

I Saw a Beautiful Woodpecker is perhaps the book that most surprised, moved, challenged, and stayed with me this year, the book that I have spent the most...

Gratitude

$ · November 30, 2021

Sometime last fall I began to seriously consider making this newsletter, so even though the first post didn’t go out until March, I feel a little like I’ve...

Migrations (Poem, 1976-2020) by Gloria Gervitz

November 10, 2021

Gloria Gervitz’s monumental, 260-page poem, Migrations, has no narrative in a traditional sense, though often images or scenes rise up that offer a sense of...

Vormorgen: The Collected Poems of Ernst Toller

October 20, 2021

Two of W. H. Auden’s most famous poems, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats (d. Jan 1939)” and “September 1, 1939,” appear in his 1940 collection Another Time, in the...

The River in the Belly by Fiston Mwanza Mujila

September 21, 2021

I read The River in the Belly by Fiston Mwanza Mujila back-to-back with with last month’s Stanza Break selection, Upper Volta by Yanko Gonzalez and want to...

Stanza Break: Featur*ing

$ · August 23, 2021

A short update this month. Thanks for your patience—my piece on Yanko González’s Upper Volta goes into some of why I struggled to get a piece together about...

Upper Volta by Yanko González

August 20, 2021

Every now and then I encounter a book that I can’t quite get a handle on, and this month’s Stanza Break selection, Upper Volta by Yanko González, translated...

Comfort and Challenge

$ · July 13, 2021

Past book logs, with the current one in gray on the left. In recent years, I have not been consistent about keeping a journal or diary, which I did through...

Pillar of Books by Moon Bo Young

July 8, 2021

I want to note before I dig into this month’s dispatch that I have a fairly in-depth essay about my relationship to reading that will go out to paying...

Stanza Break: May reading list and June update

$ · June 10, 2021

Happy June, poetry friends, First of all, I want to share that the terrific journal Yalobusha Review published three of my Psalms in their new issue earlier...

Artaud the Mômo by Antonin Artaud

June 8, 2021

In my undergrad theater classes we occasionally read selections from the 1958 Grove Press edition of Antonin Artaud’s book The Theater and Its Double, but...

April by the books

$ · May 21, 2021

Happy late-May everyone! This spring continues its theme of being A Lot and I want to thank you for your patience as I was two weeks behind on sending out my...

The Complete Poems of San Juan de la Cruz

May 20, 2021

I grew up in a moderately religious family, and attended a Catholic high school and a Lutheran college, so I suspect I’ll be working to understand my...

April is the whatever

$ · April 8, 2021

Happy April (and National Poetry Month), friends— March was appropriately lion-like for me, at least as far as creative projects go. After launching Stanza...

The Sabotage Manuals by Ida Börjel

April 6, 2021

I saw this tweet while I was reading Miximum Ca’ Canny The Sabotage Manuals by Ida Börjel and it articulated my main gripe with the book: direct action and...

The Clock Tells the Hour

March 24, 2021

A brief note to invite you to The Clock Tells the Hour next Wednesday, March 31, at 7pm U.S. Eastern (6 CT / 5 MT / 4 PT). I’ll be reading a new piece as...

On Stanza Break

$ · March 5, 2021

Happy Friday! As I wrote at the end of the first free newsletter I sent a few days ago, I’m thinking of this project as a way of talking to myself about the...

Guillevic's Geometries

March 2, 2021

The concept of Guillevic’s Geometries feels distinctly French to me, combining Beckett’s minimalism, a constraint like those the Oulipo developed, and a...

Small dispatches on poetry in translation and books outside of a publicity cycle

February 3, 2021

Welcome to Stanza Break, small dispatches on poetry in translation and books outside of a publicity cycle. The U.S. publishing and publicity cycle is...