Linda Gregg’s “Beauty” was published in the March 25th, 2002 issue of the New Yorker.  However, I came across this poem in the 2003 edition of Best American Poetry. Gregg’s poem stands stark on the page as it is centered and short,and I found that the freedom and pluck of both its presence and physical form translated into…

Published in The Paris Review of Fall 2013 Charles Simic’s “So Early in the Morning” shows Simic’s emotion and reaction to the recent passing of friend. Simic was born in Yugoslavia and emigrated to the United States as a teenager. He spent the first eleven years of his life living through World War II and…

Originally published in the 2008 summer edition of the Cimarron Review, Christine Marshall’s “Sweat“ discusses a subject that most readers can relate to. The ten stanza, free verse poem was selected to appear in the 2009 edition of The Best American Poetry. My first thought about “Sweat” was similar to that of the quote that introduces the…

Dora Malech’s “Party Games,” first published by The Hopkins Review in the Fall of 2014, focuses on a girl and a pinata. Malech, born in New Haven, now works as the Assistant Professor of Poetry at Johns Hopkins University. Malech has written many poems about the ideas of beauty and truth, however, in this poem…

When I first read “19-: An Elegy” I was dumbfounded by the title. On the surface, the title seems different, almost as if Feld glued two numbers and two symbols next to each other, and then negligently slapped on “An Elegy.” Feld, who is very much a contemporary poet, published his poem in the spring…

Steven Heighton, author of “Collision,” is a novelist, translator, and short story writer. Most known for his novel Afterlands, Heighton’s writing is intriguing and personal. “Collision,” published in April 2011 and featured in the 2012 edition of Best American Poetry is perhaps even more intriguing and personal than the rest of his writing. I discovered this…

    I would call myself a reader of the night. I’ve found that reading poetry in the sleepy hours of the post-dinner haze, with the ever present scent of chamomile tea, provides me with a better angle to sink into the lines, to completely submerge myself in the strangeness of verse. When the world…

Elaine Equi’s ¨A Story Begins¨ first appeared in New American Writing’s 29th issue in 2011. Equi, who has published six books with Coffee House Press, was born in Illinois in 1953. Now, she teaches at New York University and in the MFA programs at the New School and City College. When I first came across Equi’s…

Published in the Spring of 2010, Alan Michael Parker’s well-known “Family Math” has become a mysterious puzzle for me to figure out. Throughout Parker’s career, he has written eight collections of poems and three novels. Parker has been working at Davidson College since 1988 as a professor in creative writing. As I flipped through the 2011 edition of…