Covid-19 Readings: Christina deVillier

During the spring term of 2020, the student director of the Carl and Sandra Ellston Ars Poetica Literary Lecture Series, Carissa Cummings, and I wondered how we might continue during the lockdown. We invited three writers at different points in their careers to join us via pre-recorded readings: Henrietta Goodman, Sarah Aronson, and Christina deVillier. […]

Covid-19 Readings: Sarah Aronson

During the spring term of 2020, the student director of the Carl and Sandra Ellston Ars Poetica Literary Lecture Series, Carissa Cummings, and I wondered how we might continue during the lockdown. We invited three writers at different points in their careers to join us via pre-recorded readings: Henrietta Goodman, Sarah Aronson, and Christina deVillier. […]

Covid-19 Readings: Henrietta Goodman

During the spring term of 2020, the student director of the Carl and Sandra Ellston Ars Poetica Literary Lecture Series, Carissa Cummings, and I wondered how we might continue during the lockdown. We invited three writers at different points in their careers to join us via pre-recorded readings: Henrietta Goodman, Sarah Aronson, and Christina deVillier. […]

Re-visiting the West: Susan Kay Anderson’s “Mezzanine”

Finishing Line Press, $19.99 reviewed by Cameron Scott Susan Kay Anderson’s “Mezzanine” is one of the best collections of poems I’ve read this year. Maybe it is because I am partial to the West. As in the dusty, isolated, windy, vast open spaces tucked away from urban centers, trashed-out, stuck in its solitude but still […]

Review of Dear Z: The Zygote Epistles by Diane Raptosh

Reviewed by Melissa Kwasny Etruscan Press, 2020. Paperback, 116 pages. $17.00. Conceive: to plan or devise a plan in the mind, or, in biological terms, to become pregnant, as with a child. But what does it mean to be conceived, and a larger question, to be conceived 200,000 years ago as a separate species—with an astonishingly […]

Review of The River Where You Forgot My Name by Corrie Williamson

Southern Illinois University Press/Crab Orchard Series in Poetry, Paperback, 80 pages. $15.95. By Melissa Kwasny “A poem can be said to have two subjects,” Richard Hugo states in his collection of essays on writing, The Triggering Town, “the initiating or triggering subject, which starts the poem or ‘causes’ the poem to be written, and the […]

Poetry Of Presence: An Interview with Phyllis Cole-Dai & Ruby R. Wilson

By James Crews Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems was published by Grayson Books in 2017 and has since amassed quite the following among those interested in the intersections of mindfulness practice, meditation and poetry. I spoke with editors, Phyllis Cole-Dai and Ruby R. Wilson, via email in the summer of 2019 about […]

So Precious: On The Hip Hop of Kunu Bearchum

By Steven Jackson Before this assignment for basalt, I was unfamiliar with Kunu Beachum (Stryk-9) or the other So Precious performers, Jordan Wheeler, and Adrienne Fainman. Nevertheless, as an unabashed hip-hop head who grew up watching shows like Yo MTV Raps, Rap City, and BET Uncut, I appreciate the opportunity to critique their hip-hop video. Stryker-9 […]

The Empty Hand of the Wind

by Robert Stubblefield Even as a student editor of a college literary magazine, perhaps particularly as a student editor of a college literary magazine, you are aware of those rare instances when a work lands on your desk that unequivocally belongs. And on that late winter afternoon in 1992 when I opened the envelope and read “Graves […]

A Forest of Names (December) by Ian Boyden

[Throughout 2018, we have committed to publishing a selection of poems from each month of Ian Boyden’s manuscript “A Forest of Names.” Over the course of a year, Boyden translated the 5,196 names of schoolchildren crushed in the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake. He then began a collection of poems, each written on the day of each […]