Last March, I began a blog challenge to read 100 books in a year. That year isn't over, but I failed miserably and almost immediately. I made it through approximately five novels before I experienced a series of radical life changes...

he following list represents the highlights of a year of reading.  It includes three novels, two works of creative non-fiction, two books of poetry, one biography, one work of criticism/theory, and one book of photography accompanied by poems. The diversity is unintentional.  Some are recent publications, while others are new discoveries for me...

The award-winning poet sits down to discuss his life and work.

Brendan Constantine There are people our eyes can’t ride. My grandmother had an expression for it in Greek: Our eyes fall off them. Who don’t you see? What do they make plain instead? Have you thanked them? It’s probably relative. That is, not a question of beauty or character but rather, where you’re standing & when & how long. Today I said hello to someone who didn’t answer. No telling which of us wasn’t there....

  6. Pete Dexter’s Deadwood. Page 144 of 365. Nothing about this makes sense.  Dexter’s Spooner was one of my favorite books of 2009; I laughed out loud like a giddy adolescent. And I love westerns. Perhaps, it was because I had jusr re-read Leslie Marmon Silko’s masterpiece Ceremony and was more interested in a song cycle I was working on related to that book. I think I’ll go back to this one, though, as I often...

Jeffrey Parker The numb narcotic of scrolling down the forever page, growing longer as the day dissolves its relevance into repetitions of images and words, floating over black electricity and disappearing as quickly from memory as from the last neurons – shifting between the hum of backlit screens and the faint subconscious, the dead white illumination of time projects its blindness like snow falling into the white morning, when...

Rachel Mehl my parents read Mother Earth News, sold their house in Seattle to buy a 35 acre plot of forest and swamp. They built a house with a wood furnace, and planted a vine maple in the courtyard to cool the hall in summers. Grandpa Hi water witched. They put in a well. My pregnant mother shingled the roof, belly swelling with what would be me. They brought me home, buried my placenta under a ginkgo. My mother had planted sweet...

Rachel Mehl A parent could tell a child she was praying, her back legs broken, facing the trees along the freeway, sitting up like a dog. I had to swerve not to hit her. I have a friend who writes of desire. Of the bodies flesh and bone. Sex without love, I’ve figured out, but not her hunting. How she can kill with no reason, with a fridge full of radishes and cheese, brackens and mushrooms all around her. Rachel Mehl has...

P. Ivan Young I hear the knocking of their hooves, watch the wood splinter, needle the sun shafts that pierce my dark. Who wouldn’t challenge the boldness of young goats crossing to greener pastures as if this were some right? I knew their deception would end badly for me. But because they were trying something new, I let them through without pointing out how obvious they had been. I don’t eat goat, but conflict was a way...

Ruth Foley Suddenly, the leaves cannot keep silent. They snap like brittle fingers under torture. They slice the air and leave it gasping, open. At first, they say, you are too surprised to feel pain. I think the air must be like that today, stunned into speechlessness by the violent turning of what once seemed innocuous. And I know where the cold snap gets its name. The smallest branches know it too, as their leaves grow unbearable...