Celebrating Poetry Month with Birmingham Poetry Review

This is National Poetry Month, a very intense and busy period for poets. More on that and how it plays with the Steiny Road Poet but first this—

Adam Vines has produced another lush issue of the Birmingham Poetry Review which I urge you, Dear Reader, to check out.  If you look at the list of contributors, you will see poems by such poets as: Andrew Hudgins (featured poet with an essay on Hudgins by Ned Balbo, Sheila Black (just hung out with her at Split This Rock Poetry Festival), Eamon Grennan, Stephen Priest translating Gergen Manstoff, Rachel Richardson, R. T. Smith, Joshua Weiner, Mike White (winner of The Word Works 2011 Washington Prize).

As you may recall, Steiny blogged a poem review from BPR 2013 for every day of April and then gave it prominence in a Scene4 article celebrating Gertrude Stein's poem "America."



So what I'm going to do here is just give you a few lines from the poets mentioned above to whet your appetite:



from "Mr. and Miss Bryce Hospital" by Andrew Hudgins

Batman hugged her tall guant Robin to her hip,
but their torsos twisted away into a gnarled
asymmetic Y against a backdrop
of black capes. They held, held, held


from "Paicambu Cemetery" by Sheila Black

So many of us: blind girl with tin
can, man with elephantiasis,
his leg a familiar monster.


from "Things in the Vicinity" by Eamon Grennan

White football of the moon going gradually transparent


"Studies in Postmodernism" Stephen Priest translating Gergen Manstoff

Clonazepam Sunday,
cigarette,
Internet-dawdle.

The squirrels
place their shells
on my stoop
for safekeeping.


from "A Change of Heart" by R. T. Smith

Sunday night a widow in Winslow, Arkansas
came home to find an owl's fully detailed
profile printed on her patio door as clear
as a photographic plate


from "The Firm" by Joshua Weiner

Among the firm, a questioning believer.


from "Snow Globe" by Mike White

Nothing that rough god
could do about the snow

but move it from place
to place.


Now I must go back to the slide showing I'm developing for my ephrastic-cliophrastic reading April 6 at the National Museum of Women in the Arts that includes B. K. Fischer (winner of The Word Works 2012 Washington Prize) and Jo Ann Clark (leader of the Hudson Valley Writers' Center).