Pat Perry is from Michigan and is committed to real things. He likes to draw and paint and play and run and write. Although he is happy to be able to speak and have an audience through his artwork, he does his best everyday to listen and learn from the world he lives in. His work will be featured in Issue 25.2.
And we were able to interview him:
Selina Hammond: You’ve created an entire series based on Alaska that includes illustrations, sketches, and photography. The series also seems like a slight departure from your other personal work.What is it about Alaska that is different from everything you’ve done before?
Pat Perry: One huge difference is that the work from Alaska was all made in one month. It was focused more on Katmai and being in the wilderness than the emotional baggage that I’ve tried to stowaway into some of …MORE
by Natalie van Hoose, Audio Archives Editor
 Spring is a stingy season in Indiana. After a night so balmy we left the windows open, Friday came as a real smack on the knuckles: mid-thirties, bracing winds, and Puritan rain (or is it sleet? Sheisse, it is).
This calls for a hot poem. What better example than “Stack Sex” by Issue 21.1 contributor Christopher Kempf, himself a native of Fort Wayne? He knows (he must!) what it’s like to love young in Indiana—the dearth of good make-out spots, the toxic rivers, and unwilling weather. Cornfields aren’t exactly beds of clover, either.
We cope/copulate as best we can, even if that means dropping our duds and raising some dust in the boonie back-aisles of the library—er, we mean via this steamy poem, of course, because to paraphrase Kempf, …MORE
By Natalie van Hoose, Audio Archives Editor
In honor of National Poetry Month, we will be spotlighting one poem each Friday from our Audio Archives.
 Today’s feature is Rasma Haidri’s “The Passion” from Issue 21.1. Buckle up for this one, audio fans. That Haidri manages to skate away with two-ton words like “soul,” “substantiation,” and “primal scream” may be nothing less than a miracle, but there is no denying that her punch-packing poem about a couple’s first fight—over Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ—will leave you stinging in the best of ways (just try to think of another poem in which “incarnation” occupies the same space as “shit”).
This poem comes armed with explosive and implosive potential, an “Upper Room oration” in a basement garage. In the gospel according to Haidri, redemption still comes at …MORE
by Natalie van Hoose, Audio Archives Editor
In honor of National Poetry Month, we will be spotlighting one poem each Friday from our Audio Archives.
Today’s feature is John Randolph Carter’s “Luggage” from Issue 25.1. A dizzying blend of quirk and wisdom, each thought in “Luggage” lies somewhere between aphorism and one-liner. Pick a few to pocket–our current favorite is “Dull spurs make a dull cowboy,” although the mental image of Patsy Cline needling out a mean argyle also has its appeal. Take a listen!
Feel free to visit our archives for another flight of fancy courtesy of John Randolph Carter, and be sure to pop in next Friday for a new selection.
 By Matt Kilbane, Poetry Co-Editor
My admiration for James Longenbach’s new collection of essays, The Virtues of Poetry, has everything to do with this poet-critic’s bifocals, his capacity to take the short- and long-view simultaneously and with equal rigor. It’s a bird’s eye intimacy, made possible by a kind of thoroughgoing poetic piety, an abiding reverence for the poets under discussion. We’re talking Shakespeare, Marvell, Donne, Blake, Dickinson, Whitman, Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Oppen, Bishop, Lowell, Ashbery and Glück. No surprises there. But these canonical pillars are strangely illumined in Longenbach’s loving hands. The best metaphor I can fashion is but a poor one: the austere Professor Longenbach is bear-hugging a poem, say, “The Wild Swans at Coole,” and his intimate grip slips into a groping, some heavy breathing, but his head is firmly hooked over the poem’s shoulder—all the …MORE
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