Poets & Writers Magazine July/August 2022

WHEN I STARTED WORKING FOR THIS MAGAZINE MORE THAN two decades ago, one of my responsibilities, as the editorial assistant, was to open the mail. Back then, in the final months of the twentieth century and the first couple of years into the twenty-first, there was a lot more postal mail arriving at the office than we see today. The Letters to the Editor section, now called Reactions, was filled with many more mailed-in missives than e-mails. This was before Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, of course, so if readers wanted to compliment or critique, many of them did so using a postage stamp. Up until a week or so before this issue was due to the printer, we had planned in Reactions (page 11) to share a letter by eighty-sevenyear-old poet…

LETTERS Feedback from readers Thank you for Kristen Iskandrian’s powerful and moving essay “What I Deserve: How to Write Like Nobody’s Reading” (May/June 2022). To describe herself as a “failed poet” is a mistake; her writing is pure poetry. DAVE MORRISONCamden, Maine I am sharpening my pencils to embrace the writing life after a rewarding twenty-two-year career in education as a language arts instructor, but not without some trepidation. After decades driven by ringing school bells, I am daunted by stretches of unscheduled time. After effectively managing innumerable classrooms, I am hesitant to oversee my own writing sessions. Jami Attenberg’s “1000 Words of Summer: How an Accountability Project Opened Up My Writing Life” (May/June 2022) is exactly the after-school care that I need. Attenberg’s summer partnership offers a thousand-word commitment, participant encouragement, and…

Centering Neurodivergent Poets If reading is another form of listening, truly attuning to an unfamiliar voice can be a means of transformation. Since 1980 the nonprofit publisher Milkweed Editions has sought to engender just such change in readers, with the stated purpose of being “a site of metamorphosis in the literary ecosystem.” Milkweed’s titles—including Robin Wall Kimmerer’s best-selling literary phenomenon, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, and Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s acclaimed illustrated essay collection World of Wonders—showcase a diversity of genres and styles, many of them radical and experimental. Now, with its new Multiverse series, Milkweed pushes even further into territory largely unexplored by traditional corporate publishers: neurodivergence. The series is devoted to publishing books that explore “different ways of languaging,” all written by neurodivergent authors. The series’…

BRIAN GRESKO is a writer based in Brooklyn, New York, where he co-runs Pete’s Reading Series. RACHEL ZARROW is a writer living in San Francisco. Her work has appeared in Catapult, Electric Literature, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among other outlets. LIZ GONZÁLEZ, author of Dancing in the Santa Ana Winds: Poems y Cuentos New and Selected (Los Nietos Press, 2018), is a fourth-generation southern Californian. Her writing recently appeared in Air/Light, Poets & Writers Magazine, the International Literary Quarterly, and elsewhere. DANA ISOKAWA is the managing editor of the Margins and a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine. RUTH MADIEVSKY is the author of a forthcoming novel, All-Night Pharmacy (Catapult, 2023), and a poetry collection, Emergency Brake (Tavern Books, 2016). Her work appears in the Los Angeles Times, Harper’s Bazaar, Guernica, Tin…

“On June 23, 1626, a fishmonger of Cambridge market discovered a century-old manuscript in the belly of a codfish.” Voice of the Fish: A Lyric Essay (Graywolf Press, June 2022) by Lars Horn. First book, nonfiction. Agent: PJ Mark. Editor: Chantz Erolin. Publicist: Claudia Acevedo-Quiñones. “There’s a fly in the house I can’t kill.” Human Resources (Milkweed Editions, June 2022) by Ryann Stevenson. First book, poetry collection. Agent: None. Editor: Daniel Slager. Publicist: Claire Laine. “Cap Joyce was a cowboy who ran an Arizona dude ranch called the Spur Cross because acting like a cowboy, for tourists, was more lucrative than the actual herding of cattle.” The Crane Wife: A Memoir in Essays (Doubleday, July 2022) by CJ Hauser. Third book, first memoir in essays. Agent: Meredith Kaffel Simonoff. Editor: Lee Boudreaux.…

Even as the number of awards for debut poetry books seems to have increased over the years, an inordinate number of those awards are won by writers age forty and under. Some awards even have an age limit of thirty-five or younger. But Passager Books, an independent press based in Baltimore, recognizes that not all debut poets are “young,” that youth is not a prerequisite for talent and relevance. In 2018 the press established one of a handful of prizes offered by small presses for older poets: the Henry Morgenthau III First Book Poetry Prize. The award is “given biennially for a first book of poems by a writer age seventy or older” and includes $3,000 and publication of the winning manuscript. This spring, Passager announced the newest recipient of…