Maeve McKenna: “I have been writing poetry since I was a child. In the Dublin suburb where I grew up, life was about surviving and the idea you could become anything other than a worker seemed fanciful, and so, I wrote poetry in secret for most of my life and dreamed of one day being ‘a poet.’ Many of my poems allude to my childhood years, a deeply traumatic time of revelations and change for the Irish nation. I now write without fear, old enough to be at peace where I find myself these days, living a quiet life in rural Ireland and allowing nature to be the new inspiration in telling the stories I still need to tell.” (web)
Dusty Bryndal: “I have written poetry all my life, but began building confidence as a writer and poet when my friend would make me read my poems out loud in her cozy, art-filled living room. I have since found a writing community who taught me that it is OK to write about the raw, ragged details of losing a child and that people want to read about sad things. For the last five years, writing poetry has helped shape my grief and my healing as I navigate the waters of my son’s tragic ending.” (web)
Jean L. Kreiling: “The surreal quality of pandemic life strains the brain, and recent news of spikes in infections and deaths has exacerbated the stress. While I’m grateful that Covid-19 has not affected me or my loved ones in any dire physical way, I suspect I’m not the only one who feels as if I’m living in some alien universe—some unimaginably difficult world from which I cannot escape, where time (among other things) doesn’t function properly.”
Amlanjyoti Goswami: “India pervades my experiences and poetry. This is about living, breathing, and thinking deeply about things around me. Where I come from and where I am going. Traditions, histories, ways of seeing, hearing, and knowing. I draw upon rich traditions of Indian aesthetic in my work and am not afraid to cross borders. This is about the neem tree as much as the new Mercedes on the street, busy with street vendors selling you dim sums. There is an aesthetic in all this I wouldn’t find in New York or London. Layers more than strict lines. A lot of colour.”
Amanda Gaines: “Even when I’m not writing about West Virginia, bits of flora find their way in. I just moved to Oklahoma to get my PhD. The first thing I noticed upon leaving home was how short the trees were, how low-slung the hills ran. That kind of openness leaves little room for mystery. A poem, I think, should be curious. A surprise, a discovery. West Virginia’s landscape lends itself to finding. Most writing has to do with place, at least a little. My whole life has been spent inside Appalachia, and I’m still finding wonder in whippoorwills, in silver minnows, in blackberry thickets along the highway. Now more than ever, I find myself revisiting the mountains in my prose. There’s some strange magic that comes from living in a place so often forgotten, a place hidden. There’s a quiet wildness that can be found in West Virginia. My poetry, at its best, tries to preserve this. Fireflies in a jar, the fuzzy blooms on zucchini, the way red clay dries in cracked hands.”
Ekphrastic Challenge, September 2021: Artist’s Choice
Image: “The Blood in the Veins” by Rachel Slotnick. “Revelations” was written by Sean Wang for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, September 2021, and selected as the Artist’s Choice.
Comment from the artist, Rachel Slotnick: “After reading ‘Revelations,’ I couldn’t shake its spell. It peers through the eyes of the dying in a way that confronts the limitations of living. Here on earth, we look up at the stars and long for there to be a heaven. This poem speaks to the loneliness too many of us have known in the hospice room. It pinpoints the ache of outliving someone, of being left behind, and being tasked with remembering.”
Alison Townsend: “‘Burritos in Wisconsin, is part of a series of poems I’m writing about my late brother, who died of kidney failure at age sixty-four in 2019. A doctor himself, he was a model of grace and courage, and had one of the longest lasting kidney transplants in the world. The poem arose from various memories (especially about cooking) of the times he visited me in Wisconsin. Siblings can, I think, become homes for one another in adulthood. The poem articulates my hope that I was that for him, while bearing witness to the difficulty and loneliness of his passing. Grief crystallizes things. This is one of the few poems I’ve ever written that came nearly whole, as if dictated.”
