Lookout celebrated National Poetry Month by releasing John Rybicki’s When All the World is Old last week. The book of raw and wise poetry pays homage to the brave love John and his wife, Julie, shared during her sixteen-year battle with cancer. If we do say so ourselves, it is a collection for every kind of reader. To continue to honor Poetry Month, some of the Lookout interns would like to share the other poetry currently on their nightstands.
“I just finished reading Rocky Dies Yellow by Michael Lally. Fantastic poems, but I may have some kind of a bias because Lally is a Jersey boy, too. Read it through one sitting, and plan to read it again before giving it back to my professor, Mark Cox. A+ for teachers who lend students awesome poetry all the time!”
(Rocky Dies Yellow is out of print. It was published by Blue Wind Press.)
– John Mortara, Lookout Intern
“I picked up Fjords Vol. 1 at Powell’s Books while visiting Portland, Oregon, last week. Author Zachary Schomburg is a Portland native. The first selection I read was dark, surreal, and ended with the line, “Can’t you see we’re dying here?” I was hooked. He took some risks with the formatting — a lot of white space for prose poetry — but it all comes together beautifully.“
– Jesse McCarl, Lookout Intern
“I’m reading Lisa Fay Coutley’s In the Carnival of Breathing out of Black Lawrence Press. It was the winner of the 2009 Black River Chapbook Competition, and rightly so. Coutley manages to be both delicate and unrelenting in her explorations of loss and love. She has a knack for imagery that feels otherworldly but is also as banal as a boot sole. Love, love, love it.”
– Anna Sutton, Lookout Intern
“I am a fiction writer, so when it comes to poetry I tend to be more prose-inclined. Road-side Dog by Czesaw Miłosz is full of inspiring, prose-based poems by one of the greatest poets of the twenty-first century.”
Road-side Dog is a translation published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
– Ana Alvarez, Publishing Laboratory Teaching Assistant