Rodney Wittwer Red Hen Press ($17.95) by Ralph Pennel Gone & Gone, Rodney Wittwer’s debut poetry collection, bears the grace of a poet writing at mid-career. It reminds us all at once that it is impossible to imagine a life free of difficulty, of contradiction, of complication; that our lives would be much less rich […]

RARE MOMENTUM Athena Kildegaard Red Dragonfly Press ($15) BODIES OF LIGHT Athena Kildegaard Red Dragonfly Press ($15) CLOVES & HONEY Athena Kildegaard Nodin Press ($16)   by James Naiden First collections of poetry can be exciting: brand new talents, fresh voices, limitless potential. Sometimes a second collection has the power to confirm that talent, though […]

  BROKEN GATES Ken McCullough Red Dragonfly Press ($15)   CONFLUENCE OF MYSTERIOUS ORIGINS William Waltz Factory Hollow Press ($7) by William Stobb Having grown up as a poet on regional Midwestern anthologies like Common Ground, Beyond Borders, and Prairie Volcano, I was introduced early on to the conventions of deep image poetics. And as a native of […]

Flipping into Wit An Interview with David Shields   photo by Tom Collicott In 2010, David Shields whipped critics and scholars into a frenzy over his manifesto, Reality Hunger (Alfred A. Knopf). An examination of the role of authenticity in art, literature, and popular culture, the book earned Shields both fans and enemies. In support of his […]