William Wright

The majority of poetry readers—even the most voracious of us—have gaps in knowledge about poets we’ve been meaning to experience, poets we know we’ll appreciate, but for reasons that evade us, we have not gotten around to. For me, Maxine …

Robert Parham, who for many years has dedicated much of his life to his own poetry and to the poetry of others via his co-editorship (with James Smith) of the Southern Poetry Review, has in The Relentlessness of Salvation proven …

A few weeks ago, after I sent a query to a widely known magazine (which will remain unnamed) about their possible interest in a review of The Complete Poems of James Dickey, the response was understandable, if peculiar (and this …

American poetry is an amorphous entity, ever-shifting, uncontainably vast. Frankly, as in any era, in any place, there is good poetry, and there is bad. I will not run the risk of berating contemporary writers whose popularity (I feel) derives …

Jack B. Bedell’s Bone-Hollow, True: New & Selected Poems marks a mid-career milestone for a poet that’s helped define Louisiana’s contemporary poetry, as well as Southern poetry in general. Divided into four sections—New Poems, Call and Response, Come Rain, Come …

Winner of the George Garrett Fiction Prize for his novel The Pugilist’s Wife (Texas Review Press, 2011), David Armand second novel, Harlow, is a raucous and evocative tale, the story of a young boy, Leslie, attempting to find his father, …

A gray leaf enshrouds the earth. I think of how the rain shifts eastward into Carolina, how the clouds siphon highways of any least shadow. Where is my father but on the moss- ridden hill of his yard, the leaves …

Click to hear William Wright read his poem, “Nora” —in memory of Patricia Highsmith’s “Oona” In the country of windfall apples and chicory stubble, the blue glow of hidden things molded by every fall, a man left his wife, his …

Red as a cardinal in winter, it leans ruined in the gray field, form falling against a sycamore, its older, wiser wife. Closer in, a fox den in the hay tunnel light where green eyes haunt the nearby woods and …

(Carnegie Mellon, 2013) The Fortunate Era, Arthur Smith’s fourth full-length collection of poetry, proves challenging, as many of these poems are unflinching, headlong gazes into death and the concept of what lies behind perception and time, behind realities detectable via …

(Orchises, 2013) $21.95 Hardback. Derek Sheffield’s first full-length collection, Through the Second Skin, is the culmination of a complex and brilliant mind drawn to the natural world, a mind just as keen to explore human beings—whether in relation to non-human …

Recommended by William Wright Casey Clabough’s first novel, Confederado, is the story of Alvis Benjamin Stevens, a confederate soldier of central Virginia who returns home four months after the official conclusion of the American Civil War to find the context …