poetry

How do we love the land, even as we participate in doing damage to it? How do we honor those who have come before us, even as we acknowledge the destruction they advanced? These are the questions that came to me as I read “Pennsylvania Furnace” a new book of poems by Julie Swarstad Johnson. In poems that weave effortlessly, sometimes magically, between past and present, Johnson considers the significance of resource extraction in relation to American lives.

I work at the Pennsylvania Center for the Book and a new book of poetry by local author Marjorie Maddox came across my desk recently. The title immediately caught my attention: “A Crossing of Zebras: Animal Packs in Poetry.” I thought, collective nouns and poetry? What a great idea!

“What does a landscape dream of in its unsettled dreams?”

Todd Davis’s newest collection of poems, titled “Native Species,” opens with this question. The question is gentle and idle. It’s the kind of thing you ask yourself while half-asleep on a streambank on a hot day. But then there’s that word “unsettled.” The landscape may be “settled.” It may be cultivated into farm and town… but its dreams are unsettled, uneasy, perhaps even wild.

Erin Murphy, an English professor at Penn State Altoona, won the Brick Road Poetry Prize for her most recent poetry collection, “Assisted Living.” The poems in this collection explore the aging and caretaking processes, as well as what “assisted living” looks like throughout the lifespan.

WPSU’s Adison Godfrey talked with Murphy about the book.

As Alyce Ritti sat in the recliner in her bedroom, Camille-Yvette Welsch shared a poem she wrote inspired by Ritti’s life (see poem below).

Welsch met Ritti 15 years earlier, when she was writing an article about Ritti’s art. Poems from Life brought them back together.

“Oh, I have tears of joy,” Ritti cried after hearing Welsch’s poem.

Welsch laughed. “I’m glad. I’m glad.”

“Ice Mountain,” Dave Bonta’s most recent poetry collection, consists of short poems etched in an immediate present. Each poem is nine lines long, and carries a date as its title. The collection begins with a poem entitled “22 January, 2014”:

in the owl’s flight
as in the conifers it left
that late morning silence

and at the woods edge
the frozen carcass of a cow
pecked at by chickadees

bare trees like forks
the sky too is a dish
best served cold

This past March, slam poet Olivia Gatwood released her first collection of printed poems. “New American Best Friend,” which focuses on the struggles of girlhood and the common situations young women face, is affirming and moving.

Julia Spicher Kasdorf is Professor of English and Women's Studies at Penn State University, and an accomplished poet.  She took a sabbatical last year to visit areas of Pennsylvania affected by Marcellus Shale development, and is now completing a collection of documentary poetry based on her interviews with local residents.  WPSU's Kristine Allen speaks with Kasdorf about her recent foray into "docupoetry."