This coming 2017 is going to be a great year for poetry. Apart from my own poems, coming in March from Cascade Books, my friend and sometime traveling companion Kevin Craft is publishing his second book, Vagrants and Accidentals with the lovely University of Washington Press. Craft's previous book Solar Prominence is full of formal fun and closes with the poem "To an Amphora, Salvaged," which is one of my top ten favorite poems ever, by anyone, and which I read on my podcast here.
Meanwhile, Jeremiah Webster, another dear friend and my erstwhile colleague at Northwest University, is publishing his first collection of poems on Anchor and Plume. I wrote the following endorsement for the book's rear cover, so I won't elaborate here. Suffice it to say: I'm excited for the next year.
After so much posturing on the parts of pundits, preening celebrities, poets on the picked through street market of the avant-garde; after so much hollow flash, so much essentially genre-bent lineated prose of small epiphanies; after so much, well, else, Jeremiah Webster's After So Many Fires comes out of the Pacific Northwest like rain: greening everything, cleaning the language, sharpening the eye, casting a slant-lit wonder about this whole good God-haunted earth, and, most importantly, allowing again a kind of deep breathing.
- You can pre-order Webster's book from the A&P website
- Or order Craft's from the UWP website
- Watch this space for ordering info for Phases.