Monday, November 14, 2011

Review of Judith Skillman's The White Cypress

My review of Judith Skillman's new collection has been published in The Iowa Review's blog -- very happy to be featured there, and I've become quite a fan of Skillman's work over her last few collections, so it was a pleasure to be able to delve into the particularly rich material she covers in this one.

And that's about all the news for today.  Late autumn still has me feeling a little drowsy and a little taciturn.  I think some humans still have a gene for some vestigial form of the hibernation instinct.  If I were a scientist instead of a poet, I would check into that hypothesis.  But the very fact that I would posit it is probably sufficient proof that I am not a scientist.

Friday, November 4, 2011

In the Book, So to Speak

Daylight Savings Time hasn't even ended yet and there are still plenty of green leaves on the trees, but I'm already feeling that late autumn melancholy.  Maybe it was the freak October snowstorm last week, which was just an annoyance for me in that it reminded me winter's going to insist on coming around again this year, but it knocked out my parents' power up in Pennsylvania for almost a week, which was pretty scary.

And maybe I drank a few too many jack-and-cokes last night because I was feeling stressed about various non-writing-related things that just haven't been going so well lately.  But at least on the writing front, life has been kind lately.  It's good to have at least one area of life going one's way at a time.  At the least.  More would be OK, too.

So here's my entry in the Poets & Writers directory:  http://www.pw.org/content/janelle_kihlstrom