I’ve been picking up poetry books lately, and remembering how much I used to enjoy reading them and that I would like to again. Poetry, at its best, is the careful practice of the ‘economy of language,’ a back-to-school lesson in this season of back-to-school that all writers should return to now and then.

Here’s a poem I read, flipping through one of my old anthologies on the shelf, that ran a spark up the wire, a spark that said, “You must share this. It’s  good.”

Here’s part one of a new segment entitled, Other People’s Poetry that is Really Damn Good and You should Read It: So without Further Ado…

Your One Good Dress

Continue reading

This is not an original blog topic. I am not the first person to know someone who has unexpectedly passed away. Still, I am shaken by it, and every menial task I do has a little extra weight pushing back at me today.

But let me back up.

We went to our lake cabin this weekend, which on any given weekend in July, is usually a safe bet for summer heat and water play activity. We had a lot of water, but not of the playing kind. It drizzled, and then it poured. We couldn’t get dry and we couldn’t get warm. We burned through our propane heater fuel within a few hours and we couldn’t get a campfire to flame anything past a sickly wet smolder. As you can imagine, our sleep quality was cold, damp, and intermittent.

Continue reading