Friday Mail Bag

What is more fun than getting a bill in the mail? Well, a new poetry book for one thing...

At AWP I attended a reading by Sandra Beasley, a poet from the Washington, D.C. area that I was not totally unfamiliar with, and having checked in on her blog over the past few years I became interested with some of her work and this was one of the main factor I chose her reading over other panels that I could have attended during the conference.  While I did not pick up one of her books at the conference, there was  a short list of books I came home without that I wanted and I have subsequently ordered all but two of them they will be ordered in due time. (For the sake of an entirely differently conversation to be had on some other day, let me point out that is is one of many examples of poetry book purchases that have been blog driven).

Beasley's reading was to me like what I envision when creation explodes wide open before us. It is that atomic event that occurs when language and imagination are mixed. The two elements are unstable when properly mixed and something magical occurs. Beasley knows the right combinations.

And so back the mail, from which this conversation began. I ordered a copy of her collection of poems titled Theories on Falling and it arrived yesterday.  This book was the winner of the 2007 New Issue Poetry Prize. The judge selecting this work was Marie Howe, another poet I adore. I have her work, The Kingdon of Ordinary Time.   

Sandra Beasley On the Right at AWP with Eduardo C. Corral

I'll review the book when I have finished. (I have so many books to read since AWP)