Hello, poets! Happy August, aka a month-of-low-creativity (amIright?) followed by a month of renewal—September. Can’t you just smell the new No. 2 pencils and your Trapper Keeper? Sorry, kids. The smell of my Notes app just isn’t the same.

This September will bring some exciting changes for Poet to Poet. All summer I’ve been working on several new regular content features centered on one critical goal: helping you develop your poetry manuscript and submit it with more focus, all with more fidelity to your own voice.

Press Intelligence is one piece of it. Starting next month, each issue will include a profiles of a press or contest—profiles of key poetry presses with upcoming deadlines, including details that help you submit smarter: an analysis of the list’s most recent titles, revealing their stylistic preferences and editorial slants, plus “right for you if / not right for you if…” checklists.

The idea is to cut down on guesswork and wasted entry fees, so your time and fees go toward presses that are genuinely a fit.

More on what else is coming soon. For now, check out the preview of Press Intelligence below.

Upcoming Deadlines

• August 31 — Howling Bird Press Book Prize

• August 31 — The Off the Grid Poetry Prize for poets over 60 [see Press Intelligence, below]

• September 30 — Juniper Prize (UMass Press) [see Press Intelligence, below]

• November 4 — The Conduit Books Minds on Fire Open Book Prize

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New Poetry Books

• That Summer’s End: Poems by Lee Seong-Bok. “The poems of That Summer's End, though acutely conscious of the self, are free of an inhibiting self-consciousness, speaking directly of youth, love, fear, family, grief, old age, impermanence, and all that's central to life.”

• I’ll Leave a Light on for You by William Bortz, “weaves a haunting yet hopeful collection of poems that explore the body's relationship with joy and grief.”

• Fire in the Mind by Catharine Savage Brosman. “The iambic rhythm is felt everywhere, whatever the line and stanza forms--crafted, controlled free verse, blank verse, or traditional rhymed, metered lines. These poems ‘shake with being.’”

Workshops, Events & More

• The Hugo House runs online and in-person workshops. They are a nonprofit literary arts organization who aim to celebrate storytelling and create a space for writers to develop and share their work. You can find their monthly calander here, which contains the various readings and writing sessions offered, spanning across a variety of topics and genres. Summer classes are currently open to enrollment!

• Poets for Science Gathering– Along with poets Sarah Giragosian and Maggie Greaves, I will be co-leading Scale as Poetic and Scientific Playground: From Gut Flora to Supernovae at the Poets for Science Gathering. From gut flora to cosmic events written in trees, from molecular agencies to the vast temporalities of galaxies, scale is rich territory for both scientists and poets. Session date/time TBD. November 12-14, 2026 at Kent State University, Kent, Ohio.

Advice

Quesada’s insight here underscores what I encourage my workshop participants to consider: When you invest in becoming the best reader possible for your peers, your own work also benefits.

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Press Intelligence

Submit smarter with poetry publisher insights.

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Off the Grid Prize (Off the Grid Press)

Eligibility: open only to poets aged 60 or older. This is an age- and career-stage-restricted prize, not a general-submission press.

Founded: Off the Grid Press, 2003; the Off the Grid Prize itself, 2011. Editorial control passed to Elizabeth Murphy in 2015, who relaunched the operation as Grid Books with Off the Grid Press as its imprint.

Submission model: Annual contest.

Reading period: May 1 – August 31, 2026 (this cycle).

Entry fee: $25. No fee waiver found in any source — flagging as unconfirmed rather than assuming none exists.

Debut-friendly: Sometimes. One of four recent winners (Okie’s Woman at the Crossing) was an explicit debut collection.

Titles per year: One, through the contest. Grid Books separately publishes additional titles per year outside the contest.

Off the Grid Press, the poetry imprint of the nonprofit Grid Books, exists for a specific purpose: one manuscript a year, by a poet over 60, whose work the contemporary market tends to overlook. Across recent winners the poems are consistently concrete before they’re abstract—a chicken’s feathers, a mammogram reimagined as a fish caught in a net, wet paint on grass at dusk, river debris—and mostly narrative in shape, though the forms themselves range widely: an unrhymed sonnet, a prose poem built on wordplay, short spare lines, long unpunctuated ones. There’s no single stylistic bent here. Recent titles swing between playful formal risk (Glaser’s punning prose poems) and plainer elegy (Stearns, Medved), suggesting the press isn’t looking for work in one register. Editor-in-Chief Elizabeth Murphy, who has run Grid Books since 2015, has described being drawn to work that resists trends and fads, with a current pull toward collaborative and oral-history-based projects.

Sample poems:

• Catherine Stearns, “Snow in August”

• Susan Okie, “After the Mammogram”

• Elton Glaser, “Art and Nature”

• Jane Medved, two poems in Bracken

Right for you if:

You’re over 60 and your work has been sidelined by a market that skews toward younger debuts.

You want close, high-touch editing and a press that stays in your corner post-publication (Murphy has described ongoing consultation with backlist authors).

Not right for you if:

You’re not yet 60 — no exception exists for this prize.

You’re hoping to match a specific house style; the winners show a lot of formal range, so there’s no one zone of editorial resonance.

Submit

Juniper Prize for Poetry (University of Massachusetts Press)

Founded: 1975 (launched), first prize awarded 1976. One of the earliest university press poetry prizes in the country.

Submission model: Contest judged anonymously by a single UMass MFA-affiliated faculty judge (a different judge each year; not publicly named until winners are announced in April, since the read is blind)

Reading period: August 1–September 30

Entry fee: $30 (no fee waiver found)

Winner receives: $1,000 honorarium and a publication contract with UMass Press. Note this prize is unusual in that it names two winners every year from one pool of submissions: one for a first book, one for an author who’s published before. So a single entry fee gets a manuscript read for both tracks at once if you are a first-time author.

Debut-friendly: Yes. One of the two annual prizes is reserved specifically for a first book.

Titles per year: 2 (one debut, one open track)

Recent titles: Who Follow the Gleam, Christian Wessels (2026, first book); I Love You But I Don’t Speak Your Language, Jason Bredle (2026, open track); Strange Hymn, Carlene Kucharczyk (2025, first book); Once When Green, Mark Irwin (2025, open track, his twelfth collection)

Because the manuscripts are read blind by a different judge each year, and because the prize deliberately splits between a debut and an open track, there’s no single “house voice” the way there is at a small press with one standing editor. The four recent winners bear that out. Bredle’s poems are long-lined, absurdist, and pop-culture-saturated, playing existential dread for dark comedy. Wessels works in fragmented, asterisk-broken couplets, plain-spoken but philosophically probing, closely tied to a specific domestic moment. Kucharczyk writes in flowing, digressive, conversational blocks that move associatively toward mortality with wit rather than solemnity. Irwin’s Once When Green (per its jacket copy) is more directly elegiac and mythic, addressing ecological loss. What holds the list together isn’t form or tone, it’s that each book is working through something at stake for its author (parenthood, death, ecological grief, existential dread). The throughline is not a stylistic one.

One obvious reason for that is that there isn’t a single acquiring editor shaping this list. UMass Press staff (Matt Becker, Brian Halley, Mario Pereira) oversee the press’s broader catalog, but the Juniper Prize itself is judged entirely by that year’s rotating faculty judge, blind to author identity. That’s a structurally different bet than submitting to a press with one editor’s taste to study. It’s the old conundrum: You can’t judge your fit based on house style, rather you are left to guess at whether your work will interest whoever happens to be judging the contest that year.

One additional structural note: Current UMass employees/students and past Juniper Prize for Poetry winners are ineligible to enter.

Sample poems:

• Jason Bredle, “Healthy Smiths”: https://poets.org/poem/healthy-smiths

• Christian Wessels, “Frog Lesson”: https://www.cortlandreview.com/issue-93/christian-wessels/

• Carlene Kucharczyk, “On Beholding the Beloved’s Rotting Body”: https://www.tupeloquarterly.com/poetry/on-beholding-the-beloveds-rotting-body/

Right for you if:
· You have a manuscript with real personal or thematic stakes, regardless of whether your formal approach is spare or maximalist, comic, or elegiac.
· You’re a first-time author. Half the prize is reserved for exactly that, and the anonymous judging means a debut competes on the manuscript alone.

Not right for you if:
· You’re hoping to study editorial taste and determine your work’s fit. There isn’t one fixed taste to study here, since the judge changes every year.

Submit

That’s all for now. Until next month, happy submitting. And, as always, thank you for being here. If you find Poet to Poet useful, please like and comment on this post publicly. And share.

In gratitude,

Radha

Radha Marcum | poettopoet.com

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I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Ruben Quesada about his newest book, Brutal Companion. He shared generously about his process—from sharing drafts with a priest friend to Chicago’s influence on poetics—plus thoughts on the effects of latent formal elements.

Ruben is a poet, translator, and editor. He edited the award-winning anthology Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry. His writing appears in the New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, The Believer, and Harvard Review, among elsewhere, and his poetry collection which we discuss, Brutal Companion, won the Barrow Street Editor’s Prize.

Watch the video below, or keep scrolling to read an excerpt from the interview. To hear Ruben Quesada read poems from Brutal Companion, check out the video.

Who Was I When I Wrote This?

Radha: You’re the author of several collections, not just Brutal Companion, but let’s focus on this book today. Give us a little window into the genesis of this collection.

Ruben: The book was published at the end of 2024, and working backward from there, I knew it was ready about a year and a half before publication. I was probably two-thirds of the way through the manuscript, but I already knew what I wanted the book to become. I spent that last year and a half revising and experimenting with the order of the poems. I didn’t have many new poems left to write.

I didn’t begin with a specific project or central idea. I’d been writing poems for many years before this. Around 2013, after finishing graduate school, I became interested in a book centered on ekphrastic poetry. Ekphrastic poems—poetic responses to works of art—have always spoken to me. The artwork creates an entryway into the imagination, so I began writing those poems around 2013.

In all, I worked on this book on and off for about a decade. I wrote all kinds of poems, and eventually they began to speak to one another. The ekphrastic poems found companionship with more lyrical pieces, and gradually I realized there was a manuscript there. It wasn’t a straight line—it was a lot of meandering—but eventually I reached the point where I thought, I see something happening here. Let’s see if I can send it into the world.

Radha: That’s wonderful. It sounds as though, by the time you revisited the work during the pandemic, most of the poems already existed, and then you began writing more intentionally into the themes you discovered.

Ruben: Yeah, that’s about right. Just before the pandemic, I had begun an online friendship with another poet whose work I deeply admired. We started exchanging poems and meeting over video calls to read them aloud to one another. We’d talk about our motivations, what we were trying to explore, and where the poems wanted to go.

I had published some of those poems as a chapbook in 2018, but they really flourished during the pandemic. The poet I was corresponding with is also a priest, and somehow that relationship made me feel liberated. It felt as though I had permission to confess more openly in my work.

Radha: That’s fascinating. It’s remarkable how the right kind of companion can become the first reader—the stand-in for the eventual audience. Having someone genuinely receive the work while it’s still taking shape can be incredibly powerful.

Ruben: Yeah. I know so many writers whose partners are also writers, and they say that’s the person who always reads their work first. I’ve never really been that person. I’ve never naturally gravitated toward writing groups, and I’m generally quite private about my work while it’s still in progress.

Something about this friendship unlocked that hesitation. It made me feel that it was okay to share the work before it was finished. I’m honestly not sure I would have been able to do that otherwise.

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Radha: What formal and stylistic choices became the signature elements of this collection? How consciously were you cultivating a consistent voice or aesthetic? I’ve read the book, so I know not every poem has the same level of sonic density, but there is a recognizable sensibility running throughout it.

Ruben: A number of the poems are ekphrastic, so they were driven by the artworks I was responding to. Beyond the artwork itself, though, it was very important to me to focus on the music of the line—the syntax, the diction, the sonic qualities of language. Regardless of a poem’s particular impetus, I’ve always been interested in how a poem sounds. Some of the poems are written in formal structures. A number are syllabic, and there’s one poem where I invented my own form: ten lines, ten syllables per line, for a total of one hundred syllables.

Formal technique is something I really love now. I teach it occasionally, and it’s become an important part of my practice. Ironically, when I was a younger poet, I resisted form. I felt that something artificial was being imposed on me, and I wasn’t interested in that. It wasn’t until after graduate school, when I’d been teaching for a while, that I returned to formal poetry. Syllabics became the most accessible entry point. Syllables are already part of how we naturally hear language. Accentual-syllabic verse, on the other hand, had always been more challenging for me.

Part of that comes from the fact that Spanish is my first language. I grew up speaking Spanish, while much of the grammar and mechanics of English came through school. As I learned more about sound—about the weight of consonants and vowels—I became much more confident in working with form.

Many of the poems in Brutal Companion are syllabic, and I often think about Gregory Orr’s essay “The Four Temperaments of Poetry.” In it, he proposes four elements that work together in an ideal poem: story, structure, music, and imagination. I think about those four qualities all the time when I’m writing.

Because these poems were written over such a long period, they also reflect different versions of myself. Sometimes I read one and wonder, Who was I when I wrote this? What was happening in my life? Some poems feel looser than others because they came from a different moment in my development. But I actually like that variation. I think those more open poems make the highly structured, sonically driven poems resonate even more.

Radha: I love that you’re pointing to that modulation. A collection doesn’t have to exist entirely at one end of the spectrum. It can move between highly stylized, formally intricate poems and poems that are more spacious or conversational. That movement can actually strengthen the manuscript as a whole.

Ruben: Exactly. It’s funny—I recently started using these little gradient-colored Post-it flags to mark poems when I’m preparing for readings. I gave a reading last night, and as I was deciding what to include, I noticed something surprising.

The poems I chose came from all over the book—from the beginning, the middle, and the end—but when I read them aloud together, I could hear a very clear thematic through line. They’d been written years apart, yet they were speaking to one another in ways I hadn’t fully realized before. They’re connected by other poems in the collection, some of which are a little looser, but the emotional arc was unmistakable.

Radha: What role does place play in these poems? Is it simply setting, or is it part of the emotional and personal architecture of the collection?

Ruben: My first collection was almost entirely about place. It was an origin story of growing up in southeast Los Angeles. I lived about ten miles southeast of downtown, in a small city, and those landscapes shaped me. That’s what I wrote about. I left Los Angeles when I was around thirty and never moved back. Next year it will have been twenty years since I left.

Since then, every place I’ve lived has found its way into my poetry. I spent about five years in West Texas, in Lubbock, so there are poems about Lubbock in this collection. There are poems about Dallas. There are poems about Chicago.

There’s a poem in the book about Chicago that I actually wrote while I was still living in Texas, just before I moved here. I found myself romanticizing the city. It’s the home of Carl Sandburg and Gwendolyn Brooks—there’s such a rich poetic history here. As I was writing, I kept thinking about early twentieth-century Chicago, about Sandburg’s Chicago Poems, published in 1916. I imagined the lives of working-class people during that time. Looking back, many of them lived in conditions we might now associate with homelessness or extreme poverty. There wasn’t the kind of infrastructure we think of today.

I found myself imagining that landscape—what it must have felt like to live in that version of Chicago. That impulse extends beyond Chicago, too. I write about the Southwest, about West Texas, about Los Angeles. Each place carries its own emotional and historical weight.

Radha: As you were describing Chicago’s architecture, I couldn’t help thinking about poetic form. You were just talking about the structures of poems, about syllabics and inherited forms, and now you’re describing a city that values architectural history and preservation. I wonder whether living in that environment somehow reinforced your interest in poetic structure.

Ruben: I love that. I may have to borrow that idea. Now that you mention it, many of the Chicago poems do include some historical element. Whether they’re set near Navy Pier or in particular neighborhoods, history is always present in some way. I think poetry becomes especially valuable when it engages history, whether formally or through its subject matter.

Radha: I’d love to shift gears a little and ask about your editorial work. Before Brutal Companion came together, you edited the anthology Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry. Looking at craft through the eyes of so many different poets, did editing that anthology change the way you approached your own writing?

Ruben: That’s a really good question. The anthology includes more than two dozen original essays, each offering a different philosophy of poetry. Some writers describe how they came to poetry; others discuss how they compose poems or what they believe poetry should accomplish. Working on that project made me much more self-aware as a poet. I found myself asking what other writers were seeing on the page that I might not be seeing in my own work. One of the biggest changes was visual. It made me think much more carefully about the line itself and about the role of white space on the page.

Editing the anthology sharpened my editorial instincts. It made me more sensitive to revision, not only in my own work but in the work I edit for others. It also reminded me that there isn’t a single correct way for a poem to sound or look. Seeing so many different poetic philosophies gathered together strengthened my own convictions while also keeping me open to possibilities I hadn’t previously considered.

Radha: I really relate to that. I also work in editorial roles, and I find that perspective invaluable. First, because we can never fully edit our own work—we’re simply too close to it. But second, because we become better editors of ourselves by learning to edit others thoughtfully. I think there’s a misconception, especially when we’re young writers, that if we become too conscious or analytical during revision, we’ll somehow ruin the magic—that overthinking will drain the life from the poem.

I don’t believe that anymore. Maybe in the generative stage it’s different, but when it comes to revising individual poems or shaping a manuscript, I think thoughtfulness only deepens the work. So I love hearing that editing Latinx Poetics became part of your own evolution as a writer.

Speaking of editorial processes, I’m curious about what happened once Brutal Companion was accepted. The book won the Barrow Street Editors’ Prize. How much did the manuscript change after it reached the publisher?

Ruben: It was incredibly exciting to learn that Barrow Street wanted to publish the book. I worked primarily with one editor, who served as my main point of contact with the editorial team. One of the first things they asked was whether I was confident about the organization of the manuscript. They wanted to know if this was the order I envisioned.

I said yes—I felt pretty good about it.

Then they came back with a slightly different arrangement. When I compared their version with mine, the differences were actually quite small. Maybe a handful of poems had been moved. Their reasoning was that certain poems resonated more strongly with others nearby, and they wanted to amplify those conversations across the manuscript. It made perfect sense.

When I read a poetry collection, I think about resonance from poem to poem. I imagine each poem ringing like a bell, and I want some of that vibration to carry into the next one. Their suggestions strengthened that effect.

Then they asked a question every poet loves to hear: “Do you have any more poems?” Of course I did. I sent them about a dozen additional poems, and they selected three or four that they felt belonged in the collection. Those poems ended up enriching the manuscript in ways I hadn’t anticipated.

Meanwhile, I was still writing. As I continued reading through the manuscript, certain themes kept leading me toward new work. In fact, there’s one poem in the collection that I wrote just days before I turned in the final manuscript. It arrived at exactly the right moment and found its place in the book.

Radha: I love hearing that because I think many writers assume a manuscript has to be completely fixed before they send it out. Of course it needs to be strong and carefully revised, but writing is a living process. You’re still writing new poems. Sometimes a poem arrives late and suddenly reveals itself as essential to the manuscript. It’s encouraging to know that editors can be open to that kind of evolution.

Ruben: Absolutely. They were incredibly open throughout the entire process. Working on an anthology is one kind of editorial experience. Working on your own creative book is something else entirely. I felt genuinely taken care of. Whenever I had a question, I knew I could ask it. There were no “stupid questions.” Every conversation felt collaborative, and I always felt that everyone involved wanted the book to become the strongest version of itself.

Radha: That’s so good to hear. And it resulted in a beautiful book, so congratulations again. Looking ahead, what are you working on now?

Ruben: I’ve decided to commit to another book-length project. Lately I’ve been exploring a mythological figure from Central America. My family is from Costa Rica, and when I was growing up, my grandmother used to tell me stories about this figure who would come out at night and abduct people if they stayed out too late.

Of course, it was really her way of getting me to go to bed.

I’ve become fascinated by that character, and I’m trying to imagine what it would mean to bring this centuries-old myth into a contemporary setting.

In the poems, I’ve reimagined the figure as a flight attendant in the 1960s, and the project follows her life over the course of many years. It’s been a lot of fun to write.

Radha: I love that. It sounds like such an exciting premise, and I can’t wait to see where it goes. Ruben, thank you so much for taking the time to join me today. Congratulations again on Brutal Companion. It’s been such a pleasure talking with you.

Learn more about Ruben Quesada’s work at rubenquesada.com

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Hello poets!

Summer is doing its usual thing to writing schedules — road trips, camping, houseguests, the whole gorgeous, time-eating list. If your manuscript has stalled, you’re not behind. You’re just living a life that also includes July.

Here’s what actually moved my own work forward this month: four days alone in …

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I just finished teaching Re/vision: Nurture Your Inner Poetry Editor at Lighthouse Lit Fest, and I’ve been thinking about what actually orients us in revision — and what throws us off.

Often it’s workshop. Feedback can clarify or derail, and the difference frequently comes down to whether the reader understands t…

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Hello poets!

ICYMI: Check out Starr Davis’s interview on her stunning debut collection, Affidavit. And if you are moved by something she offers there, please leave a comment! It’s a nice—not to mention super easy—way to show appreciation for poets whose work inspires us to continue our own.

REMINDER: Lighthouse Writers W…

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I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Starr Davis about her collection “Affidavit,” plus her thoughts on writing ars poetica, the vitality of writing life as it happens, and creating an emotional arc within a collection of poetry.

Starr Davis is the author of Affidavit from Hanging Loose Press, which is the winner of the Founder’s Prize. She is als…

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Hello poets! Happy May!

I’m genuinely excited to be part of Lighthouse Writers Workshop’s Lit Fest next month, joining poets like Eileen Myles and Layli Long Soldier—what a lineup. I’ll be leading two workshops, both in-person at Lighthouse Denver (3844 York Street).

The first is a two-day intensive: Borrowed Structures: Finding P…

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Hi poets,

Before I dive into the main subject today, I want to remind everyone that LITFEST 2026 REGISTRATION IS OPEN. Spots are filling quickly. Reserve your seat in these classes at Lighthouse Lit Fest 2026: Borrowed Structures: Finding Poetic Form in Unexpected Places (Two-Day Intensive) Saturday, June 13 through Sunday, June 14th; 1:00 to 4:00pm. Re…

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Hello and happy April, poets!

On my mind lately …

It’s National Poetry Month—and this is the millionth time you’ve been reminded, right? I feel resistant to it this year. That may have more to do with the state of the world and my general internet burnout than it has to do with poetry, because I also feel that there couldn’t be a …

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I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Jami Macarty about The Long Now Conditions Permit, her ecofeminist poetry collection that follows a woman walking through landscapes marked by patriarchy, ecological crisis, and ongoing trauma.

Jami is an independent editor, writer, teacher, and the author of The Minuses, her first collection which won the New …

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Hello and happy March, poets!

On my mind lately …

I’m finalizing this month’s newsletter huddled in the back of a convention center near Disneyland. While many poets I know are attending AWP, I’m in Anaheim with 67,999 other natural foods convention attendees. I started today—day 4 of 5—drinking hotel-room coffee and mi…

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I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Kyce Bello about Far Country, which is her second collection of poems.

Kyce is also the author of Refugia, which won Interim’s Test Site Poetry Series and received a New Mexico/Arizona Book Award in 2020. She is a Certified Clinical Herbalist and Registered Nurse, and has an interdisciplinary degree in Southwes…

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Recently I stumbled on this post by Lidia Yuknavitch.

a brief rant: writer emails me to tell me how demoralized and hurt she is by the critiques she received from her peers at a recent writing intensive--made her want to quit writing. the commentaries in question were "traditional" critique method, which we've all inherit…

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Hello and happy February, poets!

First off, I want to celebrate Crisosto Apache, who has been selected as the new Colorado Poet Laureate. Apache is an indigenous poet and Associate Professor at Rocky Mountain College of Art & Design. Revisit our Poet to Poet interview to learn about their work.

On my mind lately …

I’ve be…

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I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Sarah Giragosian about Mother Octopus, a poetry collection that began as a pandemic meditation on human appetites and evolved into a personal elegy after her mother’s death from cancer.

Sarah is the author of Queer Fish, winner of the American Poetry Journal Book Prize, and The Death Spiral. In 2023 the Univers…

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Hello and happy January, poets!

As this newsletter enters its fifth year—yes, FIVE!—I’m thrilled to welcome (IG @bugbela), as Poet to Poet’s editorial assistant. Check out her Substack, Bug’s Eye, and join me in welcoming her to this community.

On my mind lately …

I hope you’re entering the new year with renewed enthusiasm f…

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Photo by Green Chameleon on Unsplash

Happy New Year! As journals reopen their submission windows after the holiday break, I’m resharing one of this newsletter’s most popular posts. If you’re someone who sets goals for the year ahead, this is solid advice—but what it really offers is something more valuable than any single goal: a strategic process that b…

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Listen to the snow on earth, falling upon us

From the unknown space. Sky darkens—a line of poetry

Is half complete; the shepherd and his sheep are

Coming down from the hill, through thorns, wetland, exposed …

…

–from “Snow,” A Xin, trans. by Wang Ping

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Dear Readers: Creative Support is on pause this month while I help my husband get through an intensive cancer treatment schedule.

Someone Else Wrote Your Poem (or Book)—and That’s OK

This week, a poet wrote to me in distress. She’d crafted a persona poem about a particularly odd animal, received enthusiastic feedback from…

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After the summer’s yield, Lord, it is time

to let your shadow lengthen on the sundials

and in the pastures let the rough winds fly.

…

–from “Day in Autumn,” Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. by Mary Kinzie

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