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Shara McCallum's book, Madwoman, Longlisted for 2018 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature

Six books by writers from five Caribbean countries have been announced on the longlist for the 2018 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, sponsored by One Caribbean Media. The group ... [ read more ]

Smartish Pace 2017 Pushcart Prize Nominations

Editor Stephen Reichert selected the following poems from Issue 24 (April, 2017):

Safia Elhillo: “Self-Portrait With No Flag”
Nausheen Eusuf: “Allegiance”
Jennifer Koiter: “The Messy Girl Feels at Home ... [ read more ]

Donald Berger & Terence Winch, Reading

Johns Hopkins University
April 15, 2015
www.smartishpace.com

Interview with Jeffrey Harrison

Jeffrey Harrison's Feeding the Fire is available from Sarabande Books (www.sarabandebooks.org). Harrison is the author of two previous collections, The Singing Underneath, selected by James Merrill for the National Poetry Series, and Signs of Arrival. Jacqueline McLean: Titling a book of poems seems like a difficult enterprise. I want to ask you to talk about the significance of your title, Feeding the Fire. In presenting this question, I have a few thoughts in mind. First, there is your marvelous line from Kafka which prefaces the collection: "What one writes is merely the ashes of one's experience." This is a particularly apt line for poetry, in which we relive or try to recover something of the essence of what once was. Yet I see a contradiction here or at least an intriguing complication. In a poem like "White Spaces," you recover (without bringing him back) a college professor who continues to compel you. The closing lines of the poem read: Gone now, known too briefly and too long ago for me to bring him back in a poem, though I'd like to think that what he was and what he gave me hover at the edges of ... [ read more ]

Fear of Moving Water

Alex Grant’s Fear of Moving Water is structured in four sections, and while there is no listing for this in the table of contents, each is preceded by a brief prose poem that serves as an introduction to the section. The collection moves deftly between the serious, the sublime, and the silly, sometimes melding all three into something shining and whole. Take, for example, this passage, which serves as an epigraph to the first section ... [ read more ]