The American Poetry Review

On this episode, Elizabeth, Steven, and Hannah discuss prompts -- pro or con? -- and The Twenty-First Century by Jacob Eigen, the newly published winner of the 2024 APR/Honickman First Book Prize. Also, we dip into the archive for an appreciation of Alicia Jo Rabins' poem "Florida."

The APR team is in a punchy mood on this episode; Elizabeth tries to rein in the conversation as Steven and Hannah riff on topics including Robert Lowell's revision process and the current era of political sloganeering. Also: selections from our July/August 2024 issue, with readings from Leah Umansky and Emily Skaja.

In this episode, Elizabeth, Hannah, and Steven are thinking about prose poems -- how do they differ from other short forms, like flash fiction or the micro-essay? Poets discussed include Baudelaire, Lydia Davis, Ross Gay, Joe Brainard, Russell Edson, Harryette Mullen, and more.

Please take our survey here.

The Kunitz Prize deadline (May 15!) is just around the corner and we're thinking about the illustrious list of poets who have won it in the past 15 years. Today we discuss the prize-winning poems by Susan Nguyen and Jared Harèl.

Join us as we revel in the intricate thought processes of some of our March/April 2024 contributors, Catherine Barnett, Omotara James, and Fritz Ward.

In this episode, we're talking about the January/February 2024 issue and appreciating some formal choices in poetry. We touch upon the pantoum, the duplex, and the golden shovel, and have a chat with Dorothy Chan about her deep engagement with the triple sonnet. Plus, January Gill O’Neil reads "Manifesto," from the Jan/Feb 2024 issue.

It was the end of the year, we were a little punchy and so were the poems. We share some of our favorite super-compressed short poems from Etheridge Knight, Kay Ryan, and Jean Valentine, as well as some fiction recommendations for your wintertime reading pleasure. Also, some readings from our November/December 2023 issue by Todd Dillard and Maya C. Popa.

We've been thinking about some great first lines of poems. What makes them great and how do we get there? In this discussion, we touch upon poems by Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Eduardo C. Corral, Brenda Shaughnessy, and Elizabeth Bishop. We also have readings from the magazine by Kayleb Rae Candrilli, Katie Condon, and Dana Isokawa.

This episode is a love letter to Mary Ruefle, as we reflect on a great reading of hers (available on YouTube), from her book Madness, Rack, and Honey.

Tune in for the second half of our special two-part podcast featuring Major Jackson, who shared selections from his new book Razzle Dazzle: New & Selected Poems (W.W. Norton & Co, 2023) at a recent event at APR's home base, the Philadelphia Ethical Society.

Major Jackson is the author of six books of poetry, including_ The Absurd Man_ (2020),_ Roll Deep_ (2015), Holding Company (2010), Hoops (2006) and Leaving Saturn _(2002), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems. His edited volumes include: _Best American Poetry 2019, Renga for Obama, and Library of America’s Countee Cullen: Collected Poems. He is also the author of A Beat Beyond: The Selected Prose of Major Jackson _edited by Amor Kohli. A recipient of fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, John S. Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Major Jackson has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. He has published poems and essays in _American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, Orion Magazine, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Poetry London, and World Literature Today. Major Jackson lives in Nashville, Tennessee where he is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and serves as the Poetry Editor of The Harvard Review.