poetry

Poet, author, activist, and educator Mahogany L. Browne is having a moment. The stage adaptation of her acclaimed young adult novel Chlorine Sky premieres this month at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater. She’s finishing up a “poetic orchestral” performance she expects to unveil this spring at Wesleyan, where she’s deep into a stint with the inaugural group of Shapiro-Silverberg Distinguished Writers in Residence. And next week, Chrome Valley—the latest collection of verse from Browne, the first-ever poet-in-residence at New York’s Lincoln Center—was published by W.W. Norton & Company. Here, Browne offers insights into her work, creative process, and bringing a sense of…

A poetry collection authored by John Murillo, assistant professor of English, is longlisted for both the 2021 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection and the Believer Book Awards. Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry (Four Way Books, 2020) explores the legacy of institutional, accepted violence against Blacks and Latinos and the personal and societal wreckage wrought by long histories of subjugation. The collection includes a sonnet triggered by the shooting deaths of three Brooklyn men that becomes an extended reflection on the history of racial injustice. The PEN/Voelcker Award, which comes with a $5,000 prize, is awarded to a poet whose distinguished collection of…

In the eighth of this continuing series, Sara McCrea ’21, a College of Letters major from Boulder, Colo., reviews alumni books and offers a selection for those in search of knowledge, insight, and inspiration. The volumes, sent to us by alumni, are forwarded to Olin Library as donations to the University’s collection and made available to the Wesleyan community. Christina Pugh ’88, Stardust Media (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020) In this time of social distancing, I find myself surrounded by media more than ever. My Wesleyan friends, thousands of miles away, flicker on all my screens; I watch from my…

Kevin Prufer ‘92 is co-editor a forthcoming collection of essays on literary translation Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries (Graywolf 2017). For this collection, Prufer invited 25 translators and poets to select a poem and three corresponding English translations. To follow the selections, each of the 25 contributors composed a brief essay on what these various versions say about the art of literary translation. Additionally, Prufer co-curates the Unsung Masters Series, published through Pleiades Press, which attempts to bring out-of-print and relatively unknown poets to new readers. To complement the writer’s poems, each edition features critical essays, interviews, and letters. Prufer sees this initiative…

Michael Collins ’81 has written a new book of poems, The Traveling Queen (Sheep Meadow Press). He sent us the following comments on his collection: “This book is dedicated to Annie Dillard, who began teaching at Wesleyan University while I was there and who encouraged me to pursue a career as a writer so many times that she finally overcame my misgivings. “In general, the writing of the book was informed by my sense that poems are promises. ‘So long as men can breathe or eyes can see/ so long lives this [poem],’ Shakespeare promises in one sonnet, ‘and this…

B. J. Buckley ’76 has written a new collection of poems, Spaces Both Infinite and Eternal (Limberlost Press) which considers the natural world, quiet, unspoken events—the accidental death of an owl, a porcupine gorging on apples, unobserved fragrant meadows, the roar of wind through cottonwoods. The presence of man is barely acknowledged in the rugged western landscapes of these poems. Buckley’s voice is a quiet guide through rural, mountainous territory. Her book is printed letterpress, using lead type on a old hand-fed platen press. A native of Wyoming, Buckley lives on a ranch near Power, Montana. She has worked in…

In her new poetry collection Grains of the Voice (Triquarterly Books/Northwestern University Press), Christina Pugh ’88 reveals a fascination with sound in all its manifestations, including the human voice, musical instruments, and the sounds produced by the natural and man-made worlds. All of these serve as both the framework of poems and the occa¬sion for their changes of direction, of tone, of point of reference. The poems contain echoes—and sometimes the words themselves—of other poets, but just as often of popular and obscure songs, of the noise of pop culture, and of philosophers’ writings. Beneath the surface of her work,…

In her academic study Poetry of Attention in the Eighteenth Century (Palgrave Macmillan), Margaret Koehler ’95 identifies a pervasive cultivation of attention in 18th-century poetry. The book argues that a plea from a 1692 ode by William Congreve—'Let me be all, but my attention, dead'—embodies a wider aspiration in the period’s poetry to explore overt themes of attention and demonstrate techniques of readerly attention. It historicizes 18th century accounts of attention and pioneers a link between the period's poetry and recent discussions of attention in cognitive psychology. Koehler’s book contributes to the largely neglected history of a psychological trait that…

Mark Saba ’81 recently released Painting A Disappearing Canvas (Grayson Books), a collection of poems spanning 30 years. Centering on his Polish and Italian roots in Pittsburgh, the poems focus on the subject of family life and universal themes of what it means to be alive. Paolo Valesio, professor of Italian literature at Columbia University, writes in the book’s foreword that Saba is a “writer who meditates on the entanglement of his roots and who sounds as if he is tenderly worried that his children not be too bound up with this entanglement while at the same time he is…

Suzanna Tamminen, director of Wesleyan University Press, received a $50,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts on March 21. The grant will support Wesleyan University Press’s poetry program. The funding will support publication of 12 books of poetry in 2011 and 2012, including the new volume by Pulitzer Prize winner Rae Armantrout and the collected poems of Joseph Ceravolo. In addition to helping support publication costs, the funding will be used to help authors travel to give readings from their new Wesleyan books.

Brenda Hillman's book, Practical Water, published by Wesleyan University Press in 2009, was named a 2009 Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist in the Poetry category. The 124-page book is part of the Wesleyan University Press's Poetry Series. Publishers Weekly says "Hillman's eighth collection of poems is the third in her series of book-length meditations on the elements. In these aesthetically challenging, yet often surprisingly clear poems, which span the personal, political and environmental, water is simultaneously a transparent vessel, a mirror and an endangered resource. This is one of the most unusual and compelling books so far this year."

“We Write a World Around Those Moments”: A Q&A with Mahogany L. Browne, Shapiro-Silverberg Distinguished Writer in Residence

Murillo’s Poetry Longlisted for PEN/Voelcker, Believer Book Awards

“You Just Have to Read This…” Books by Wesleyan Authors: Pugh ’88, Tupper ’95, and Pompano CAS’95

Poet Kevin Prufer ‘92 Publishes Forgotten Poets, Essays on Literary Translation

Collins ’81 Publishes New Poetry Collection

Buckley ’76 Writes New Poetry Collection

Pugh ’88 Publishes Third Book of Poetry

Koehler ’95 Studies 18th-Century Poetry, Links to Cognitive Psychology

Saba ’81 Explores Family Roots in First Book of Poetry

NEA Supports Wesleyan University Press’s Poetry Program

Wesleyan University Press Book Nominated for L.A. Times Award