New Poems: A Reading

Julie Marie Wade is the author of four collections of poetry, including When I Was Straight, and four collections of lyric nonfiction, including Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures.  She has received an Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council, a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir.  She teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University in Miami. Her latest collection of essays is Catechism: A Love Story (SPD Books). Jenny Boully writes, “Catechism: A Love Story is a gorgeous collection of poetic essays on reading, loving, and, most delightfully, reading love between the lines. Julie Marie Wade's prose refuses tradition and convention, the expected beginnings and endings, preferring instead to investigate the gray unknowns of ritual and sacrament in life, reading, and love.

Major Jackson is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other honors. He teaches at the University of Vermont and is the poetry editor of the Harvard Review. His first book, Leaving Saturn, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award. Each of his last two collections, Hoops and Holding Company, was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature–Poetry. In his fourth collection, Roll Deep: Poems (W.W. Norton & Co.) the confident and radiant poems address a range of topics, most prominently human intimacy and war. And like his best work to date, these poems create new experiences with language owed to Jackson’s willingness to once again seek a rhythmic sound that expresses the unique realities of the twenty-first century with humor and understanding. Whether set in Nairobi, Madrid, or Greece, the poems are sensuously evocative and unapologetically with-it, in their effort to build community across borders of language and style. Yusef Komunyakaa writes, “The music in the language of Roll Deep is seductively straightforward, and each body-brain poem here puts genius squarely on the line.”

Mark Statman’s most recent books are two of poetry: A Map of the Winds and Tourist at a Miracle and two of translation: Black Tulips: The Selected Poems of José María Hinojosa, and, with Pablo Medina, of Federico García Lorca’s Poet in New York. He is Associate Professor of Literary Studies at Eugene Lang College, the New School for Liberal Arts. In his new collection of poetry, That Train Again (Lavender Ink), Statman explores the singularly multiple worlds in which he, and all of us, love and observe, work and dream. On the edges of the intersections between metaphysical and physical spaces, the urban and rural, the reader finds, in That Train Again, a sense of language and form both precise and mysterious. Joseph Lease writes, “Statman gives us language as commitment, commitment as imagination, imagination as soul-making.”

Richard Michelson is the author of the poetry collections Battles & Lullabies and Tap Dancing for Relatives. His many children’s books have been named among the 10 Best Books of the Year by the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, and the New Yorker, and among the 12 Best Books of the Decade by Amazon.com. His most recent collection of poetry More Money Than God (University of Pittsburgh Press) explores the boundaries between the personal and the political, and the connections between history and memory.  Growing up under the shadow of the Holocaust, in a Brooklyn neighborhood consumed with racial strife, Michelson’s experiences were far from ordinary, yet they remain too much a part of the greater circle of poverty and violence to be dismissed as merely private concerns, safely past. It is Michelson’s sense of humor and acute awareness of Jewish history, with its ancient emphasis on the fundamental worth of human existence that makes this accessible book, finally, celebratory and life-affirming.