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Don Bogen Don Bogen is the author of four books of poetry, most recently An Algebra. Prizes for his work include a Discovery Award, the Emily Dickinson Award of the Poetry Society of America, and an NEA Fellowship. He spent spring of 2011 in residence at the Seamus Heaney Poetry Centre of Queen's University, Belfast, as Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing. Bogen is Nathaniel Ropes Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Cincinnati and serves as Poetry Editor of The Cincinnati Review.
History is a scarified
Jane Hirshfield is the author of six collections of poetry, including After (shortlisted for England’s T.S. Eliot Prize and named a “Best Book of 2006” by the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the London Financial Times), Given Sugar, Given Salt (finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award), The Lives of the Heart, and The October Palace, as well as a book of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. Her next book, a collection of poems entitled Come, Thief will be published in August 2011.
Today when persimmons ripen Today when fox-kits come out of their den into snow Today when the spotted egg releases its wren song Today when the maple sets down its red leaves Today when windows keep their promise to open Today when fire keeps its promise to warm Today when someone you love has died or someone you never met has died Today when someone you love has been born or someone you will not meet has been born Today when rain leaps to the waiting of roots in their dryness Today when starlight bends to the roofs of the hungry and tired Today when someone sits long inside his last sorrow Today when someone steps into the heat of her first embrace Today, let this light bless you With these friends let it bless you With snow-scent and lavender bless you Let the vow of this day keep itself wildly and wholly Spoken and silent, surprise you inside your ears Sleeping and waking, unfold itself inside your eyes Let its fierceness and tenderness hold you Let its vastness be undisguised in all your days
Michael Kardos is the author of the story collection One Last Good Time (Press 53, 2011) as well as two forthcoming books—a novel, The Three-Day Affair (The Mysterious Press) and a textbook, The Art and Craft of Fiction (Bedford/St. Martin’s). His short stories appear in The Southern Review, Crazyhorse, the Harvard Review, Prism International, Prairie Schooner, and many other magazines and anthologies. He is originally from the Jersey Shore and played the drums professionally for a number of bands including Thunder Road (a Bruce Springsteen tribute band). He now lives in Starkville, MS, where he co-directs the creative writing program at Mississippi State University.
In an impressive debut collection, surprise outcomes and absurdist touches inform the misadventures of adults and adolescents living the blue-collar life on the New Jersey shore. In interlinked stories that combine the poignant coming-of-age humor of Thomas Rogers' Jerry Engels novels and the weird wrinkles of George Saunders' stories, Kardos presents a gallery of lovable losers struggling with jobs, relationships and fading dreams in the fictional town of Breakneck Beach. The grown-ups include a school-bus driver sleeping with his wife's sister who ill-fatedly kidnaps kids on a long drive to nowhere, and a high-school music teacher just short of retirement who self-destructs when his superiors force him to lower the standards of his orchestra. The teens include a mysterious girl from a town of 204 where births and deaths are arranged so they don't have to change the number on road signs, and a boy who outrages his father, a corrections officer, by imitating the faded movie-theater organist who gives florid performances in their home in the guise of lessons. The less-successful stories involve the ashes of another music teacher and a female ghost seeking vengeance. Kardos is such an original, offbeat, revealing talent that he has no need to indulge in such gimmicks. Among his other achievements is to leave lasting impressions of such attractions as the Castle of Horrors, a pier side attraction where a teen's crush on his attractive boss is requited, Richie's Famous Organ Store, where a music teacher moonlights, and the Wawa food mart, where three kids get to know each other in the middle of the night during a power outage. |