A Brave New World: Four Poets on American Life

Elizabeth Jacobson, Poet Laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico, is the author of a new full-length poetry collection, Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air, which won the New Measure Poetry Prize selected by Marianne Boruch.  About this book, Tony Hoagland wrote, “This is a collection of poems wealthy with the speaker's intimacy with nature, and with the philosophical and spiritual insights that emerge from a deep practice of close observation. These poems carry heavy water, fetched from deep nature, in human hands.”  Elizabeth is the founding director of the WingSpan Poetry Project, a not-for-profit which conducts weekly poetry classes in battered family and homeless shelters in New Mexico. WingSpan has received four grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry. Her work has appeared widely in such publications as the American Poetry Review, Orion Magazine, Ploughshares, Plume, and elsewhere. She has received residencies from Atlantic Center for the Arts, Key West Literary Seminar, Herekeke Arts Center, and the Mable Dodge Luhan House where she was the 2018 writer-in-residence. Elizabeth is the Reviews Editor for the online Eco-journal, Terrain.org.

Jaswinder Bolina is an American poet and essayist. He is author of Phantom Camera, Carrier Wave, and the digital chapbook The Tallest Building in America. His poems and essays have appeared widely in the U.S. and abroad and have been included in several anthologies including The Best American Poetry and The Norton Reader. He teaches on the faculty of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Miami. Bolina’s latest collection, 44^th of July (Omnidawn), is a book about Americans. Not the ones brunching in Park Slope or farming in Wranglers or trading synergies in a boardroom. These are the others in the everywhere, the brown and bland ones who understand the good, tough money in working a double, who know which end of a joint to hit but also where the physics meets the metaphysics. Both victim and complicit, part of the problem and apart from the problem, these are the Americans America didn’t invite.

Lenny DellaRocca has had his poetry published in literary magazines since 1980. He is the author of two previous collections, The Sleep Talker and Blood and Gypsies. A Pushcart Prize nominee, he is Founder and Co-Publisher of South Florida Poetry Journal and Founder of Interview With A Poet. The poems in Dellarocca’s latest collection, Festival of Dangerous Ideas (Unsolicited Press), conjure a nightmare world of what could be in the near future especially considering where we are in our state of politics. This is poetry of the imagination lit by old knowledge.

Michael Hettich was born in Brooklyn and grew up in New York City and its suburbs. He has lived in upstate New York, Colorado, Northern Florida, Vermont, Miami, and Black Mountain, North Carolina, where he now lives with his wife, Colleen. He has published over a dozen books and chapbooks of poetry, and his work has appeared widely in journals and anthologies. Hettich’s awards include several Florida Individual Artists Fellowships, a Florida Book Award, The Tampa Review Prize in Poetry, and the David Martinson–Meadow Hawk Prize. He often collaborates with visual artists, musicians, and fellow writers. The poems in Hettich’s latest collection, To Start an Orchard (Press 53), bring a keener awareness to the fraught and fragile natural world that is ours to inhabit, nourish, and preserve.