An Interview with Jeff Fearnside
Jeff Fearnside, author of Making Love While Levitating Three Feet in the Air, A Husband and Wife are One Satan, and, most recently, Ships in the Desert, is a writer of fabulous range and grace. After his poem “What We Call Home” was featured in Mid-American Review Vol. XLI, Jeff agreed to speak to a...
Poetry Review: Chopping Wood in the Moonlight by Ken Letko
Chopping Wood in the Moonlight by Ken Letko. Flowstone Press. 2021. 33 Pages. Paperback. Chopping Wood in the Moonlight is Ken Letko’s tribute to nature and simple living. In these tightly crafted poems, the author utilizes his years of traveling and collected wisdom to celebrate a life lived authentically. In the title poem, Letko invokes the ancient Chinese...
Poetry Review: The Track the Whales Make by Marjorie Saiser
The Track the Whales Make: New and Selected Poems by Marjorie Saiser. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. 181 pages. $19.95, print. The Track the Whales Make begins with a section of new work and then features poems from Saiser’s seven previous books, starting with the most recent and then moving backwards in time. Like Saiser’s poems themselves, the book’s construction creates a sense of what is fleeting. As the...
Poetry Review: Unholy Heart by Grace Bauer
Unholy Heart: New and Selected Poems by Grace Bauer. The Backwaters Press: An Imprint of the University of Nebraska Press. 2021. 169 pages. $19.95. Paperback. New and selected poetry collections can sometimes be cumbersome when approaching any poet to experience their work. I always find that’s because we must figure out where to begin. With Unholy Heart: New and Selected Poems by Grace Bauer, it’s...
Featured Writers: Remi Recchia and Roseanna Alice Recchia
Distinguished alumni Remi Recchia and Roseanna Alice Recchia will read their poetry as features of Bowling Green State University’s Winter Wheat Festival of 2022 from November 10th– 12th. Remi Recchia Remi Recchia writes with an unflinchingly graceful and poignant voice that resounds in every line of his poetry. Poems like, “Waking Up from Top Surgery in a Sparse Airbnb Living...
Featured Writer: Leila Chatti
At 7:30pm EST, on Thursday, October 13th, poet Leila Chatti will read her work in Prout Chapel as part of the 2022 Prout Chapel Reading Series, hosted by Bowling Green State University. Through her collection Deluge, Leila Chatti chronicles her experience with illness, uncontrollable bleeding referred to as “flooding,” surgery, and remission through explorations of...
Poetry Review: A Cluster of Noisy Planets
A Cluster of Noisy Planets by Charles Rafferty. Rochester, NY, BOA Editions, Ltd. 2001, 80 pages. $17.00, paperback. A Cluster of Noisy Planets by Charles Rafferty is an account of the melancholic passing of time, expressed through lovely observations of our world. Reading these prose poems aloud, one can sense the soft drumming of Rafferty’s...
Why We Chose It – ‘Book of Dolls 3’ and ‘Book of Dolls 8’ by Bruce Bond
“Book of Dolls 3” and “Book of Dolls 8” by Bruce Bond were selected last autumn and published in Mid-American Review Volume XLI in 2022. Something in MAR that we gravitate toward is the peculiar and uncanny. Work that tugs at our emotions on a deep human level and won’t let go. In poetry we...
Chapbook Review: All Small Planes
All Small Planes by Eric Roy. Whitman, Massachusetts: Lily Poetry Review, 2021. 19 pages. $12.00, paperback. Eric Roy begins All Small Planes with a statistic: 72,000 opioid deaths in America in 2017, which comes to 197 daily deaths, an death toll equivalent to a 737 jet fatally crashing every single day. But Roy’s collection doesn’t...
Poetry Review: Traveling With the Ghosts
Traveling With the Ghosts by Stella Vinitchi Radulescu. Asheville, North Carolina: Orison Books, 2021. 107 pages. $16.00, paperback. invocation by Stella Vinitchi Radulescu those eyes you love the violet eyes of Spring the girl descending the hill or Spring itself in violent wind— let me clean the air with a vowel...