Review of What Does Not Return by Tami Haaland

Lost Horse Press, Paperback, 78 pages. $18.00. Reviewed by Melissa Kwasny Poetry has been described as the art of speaking the unspeakable. In some cases, the unspeakable is that which seems almost too horrific to put into words. Sometimes it is that the state of being is too nuanced, the feeling too fleeting, the insight […]

Poetry Advocacy

How do we get the vital news not only from poems, as William Carlos Williams famously wrote in his poem “Asphodel,” but also of them? Many poets are skillful at promoting their work and connecting with a larger audience, but the sheer number of books published each year makes it nearly impossible to know 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 […]

Two Poems by Heather Cahoon

Heather Cahoon received her MFA in Poetry from the University of Montana where she was the Richard Hugo Memorial Scholar. She won the 2005 Merriam Frontier Award for publication of her chapbook, Elk Thirst, and was awarded a Montana Arts Council Artist Innovation Award in 2015 to support the completion of her book-length manuscript entitled, Horselfy Dress. Her writing […]

Review of Caribou by Charles Wright

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014 by James Crews On a long flight years ago, the woman next to me kept interrupting my reading of Charles Wright’s Negative Blue: New and Selected Poems (2001) to make polite small talk. Eventually, she came to the inevitable question: “What do you do?” When I confessed I was a […]

Places of Making: An Interview with Jennifer Boyden

by James Crews Jennifer Boyden is the author of The Mouths of Grazing Things, selected by Robert Pinsky as winner of the Brittingham Prize in Poetry in 2010. Her second book, The Deliverable Future, won the Four Lakes Prize in Poetry and is forthcoming from the University of Wisconsin Press. [A number of poems from  […]

Practical Advice to Aspiring Poets Living in the 21st Century by Travis Mossotti

And so it was I entered the broken world To trace the visionary company of love… ~from Hart Crane’s, “The Broken Tower” I suppose I could offer up nuggets of wisdom to you like: use number two pencils, write outdoors, listen to Bach’s Aria variata in A minor, look at the sky for the thing […]

2011 Bunchgrass Poetry Prize Award Announcement

Winner: Stacy Heiney Judge: Christopher Howell Stacy Heiney of Portland, Oregon is the winner of the first annual Bunchgrass Poetry Prize for her poem “The Breaking Around Us Is Huge.” The judge for this year’s competition was Christopher Howell. In addition to publication in the spring 2011 print and electronic versions of basalt, Ms. Heiney […]