Seriously Well by Helge Torvund
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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!
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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...