Knox Pods

Chris Tonelli is a founding editor of the independent poetry press Birds, LLC; co-director of the NC Book Festival; and author of five chapbooks and two full-length collections of poetry, most recently Whatever Stasis (Barrelhouse Books, 2018). He works in the Libraries at NC State and is the co-owner of So & So Books in downtown Raleigh, where he lives with his wife, Allison, and two kids, Miles and Vera.

Other Links:

Read "Wide Bird" and "Pluto" by Chris Tonelli

Bio and links at Birds, LLC

Interview at NaPoWriMo.net

from “A Test of Company” at poets.org

Adelaide Crapsey is best known as the inventor of the American cinquain. She was born in 1878 in Brooklyn, NY, and she grew up in Rochester. In 1903, she began to show symptoms of tuberculosis which would eventually take her life in 1914. In spite of her illness, Crapsey attended the American Academy’s School of Classical Study in Rome, and then eventually returned to the U.S. to teach at Smith College. Shortly after her death, her first book of poems was published. It was called simply Verse.

Links:

Read "Amaze" and "Niagra" by Adelaide Crapsey

Bio and poems at the Poetry Foundation's website

Adelaide Crapsey at Poets.org

Cinquain.org

Amy Wright is the author of three books of poetry and six chapbooks. Wright’s essays have appeared in The Georgia Review, Fourth Genre, Ninth Letter, Brevity, and elsewhere. She has been awarded two Peter Taylor Fellowships to the Kenyon Review Writer’s Workshop, an Individual Artist Grant from the Tennessee Arts Commission, and a fellowship to Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her nonfiction debut, Paper Concert: A Conversation in the Round, is forthcoming in 2021 from Sarabande Books. She teaches at Austin Peay State University. 

"Habitat" is used with permission by the author.

Links:

Read "Habitat" by Amy Wright

Amy Wright’s website

Forthcoming book: Paper Concert: A Conversation in the Round by Amy Wright

"Yam Weevil” at Verse Daily

“Prey,” an essay at Kenyon Review Online

Review of Cracker Sonnets and interview at New Books Network

Prince Bush is an MFA student at Western Kentucky University. His poems have appeared in many literary magazines, including The Cincinnati Review, Cream City Review, Poet Lore, Pleiades, Puerto del Sol, and others. He was a 2019 Fellow at Bucknell Seminar for Undergraduate Poets and an Erastus Milo Cravath Presidential Scholar at Fisk University. 

"Lithium" first appeared in Pleiades; "On Truth" first appeared in Sporklet. Both poems are used with permission by the author.

Links:

Read "Lithium" and "On Truth" by Prince Bush

Prince Bush’s Website

“Middle of Protesting” at Rattle

Poems at Softblow

Poems at Counterclock

Music:

"Just A Memory Now (Instrumental)" by Chad Crouch is licensed under CC

BY NC 4.0 with modifications

David Baker is the author and editor of 18 books, including 12 books of poetry. His most recent book is Swift: New and Selected Poems, published by W. W. Norton.  Baker teaches at Denison University and he frequently serves on the faculty of the MFA program for writers at Warren Wilson College. He is the Poetry Editor of The Kenyon Review.  

"Swift" is used with permission by the author.

Links:

Read "Swift" by David Baker

David Baker’s Website

"Poetry That Bears Witness to a Changing Natural World,” a review of Swift: New and Selected Poems in The New Yorker

Interview at Tupelo Quarterly

Poems and Essays at Virginia Quarterly Review Online

Swift: New and Selected Poems at Amazon.com

David Baker reading at CornellCast

Music:

"Just A Memory Now (Instrumental)" by Chad Crouch is licensed under CC

BY NC 4.0 with modifications

Tyler Mills’ poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, The Guardian, The New Republic, and others. She’s published two books and has two chapbooks forthcoming. Mills teaches for Sarah Lawrence College’s Writing Institute and she edits The Account, an online literary magazine. Look for Tyler Mills’ books in our online catalog or call us at the Reference Desk at Lawson McGhee Library.

Today's poem, "Oak," appeared in the January 2021 issue of Poetry Magazine. You can read the poem on the Poetry Foundation's website or in the links below.

Links:

Read "Oak" by Tyler Mills

Tyler Mills’ website

Bio and poems at the Poetry Foundation

“The Poetic Half-Life of One Family’s Nuclear History: Tyler Mills on Her Grandfather's Role in the Bombing of Nagasaki” in Literary Hub 

Review of Hawk Parable at Publishers Weekly

Poems at Pinwheel

Poems in Blackbird  

Introduction, reviews, and visual art at Tupelo Quarterly

Music:

"Just A Memory Now (Instrumental)" by Chad Crouch is licensed under CC

BY NC 4.0 with modifications

Cintia Santana’s work has appeared in the Best New Poets 2020 anthology, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, and many other literary journals. She was awarded fellowships from CantoMundo, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. She teaches literary translation, as well as poetry and fiction workshops in Spanish, at Stanford University.

Links:

Read "Ode to the J" and "[F]"

Cintia Santana’s Website 

Interview at The Kenyon Review

Poems at Kenyon Review Online 

“Kintsugi” at Harvard Review Online

Poems at Beloit Poetry Journal

“Plosive” (visual poem) at Pleiades

Music:

"Just A Memory Now (Instrumental)" by Chad Crouch is licensed under CC

BY NC 4.0 with modifications

Maurice Manning has published seven books of poetry. His first book, Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions, won the Yale Younger Poets Award, and his fourth, The Common Man, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.  Be sure to look for books by Manning in our online catalog.

Links:

Read "One View of Time" by Maurice Manning

Bio and poems at the Poetry Foundation

Article in Garden & Gun

Interview at Plume

Manning Reading at the Sewanee Writer's Conference (Video)

Music:

"Just A Memory Now (Instrumental)" by Chad Crouch is licensed under CC BY NC 4.0 with modifications

Watch for an upcoming poetry podcast produced by Knox County Public Library. It’s called The Beat.

David Orr, a poetry columnist for the New York Times Book Review, describes a common idea that some people have about poetry—that understanding it "is like solving a calculus problem while being zapped with a cattle prod." Or maybe worse, we hear people give (again quoting David Orr) "testimonials announcing poetry’s ability to derange the senses, make us lose ourselves in rapture, dance naked under the full moon, and so forth." We’ll try to avoid all of that.

Each show will introduce a new poet and you’ll get to hear poems being read aloud by the poets themselves, usually. The first episode of “The Beat” will air in a couple of weeks. Please tune in for the show. And if you aren't already a subscriber, you should do that in your favorite podcast app.

Dr. Melanie Mayes shares the alarm and urgency of The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells in this episode of Books Sandwiched In. She explains how the author brings stark realities of our future climate into terrifying focus—the fragility of our situation and the myriad ways that our ability to survive is endangered by the climate we are creating.

Wallace-Wells is a national fellow at the New America foundation and a columnist and deputy editor at New York magazine. He was previously the deputy editor of The Paris Review.

Mayes is a scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory researching, among other topics, the part of the carbon cycle that takes place in soils.

Music credit: "Three Stories" by Blue Dot Sessions, CC BY-NC 4.0

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