By Elizabeth Petersen
 I take Szymborska’s lead when I say the hardest sentence of an elegiac blog post is the first. Well, now that one’s behind me.
In many cases, when a poet passes a small part of the world mourns. This little world of poets and poetry readers feels a tingeing of their hope, but soon a this too shall pass sigh becomes a sort of resolution, and they (we) try to carry on. Szymborska, though, feels different. After decades of remarkable work that spoke both to the social issues many poems fear to enter and the weird wonderment that many poems fail to achieve, I realize, in a childish way, that I never thought Szymborska would ever leave the world, that she was too good, too smart, for anyone to pull a fast one on her. And part …MORE
by Conor Broughan, Fiction Editor
 We here at Sycamore Review were honored to publish Greg Schutz’s beautiful story “You are the Greatest Lake” in Issue 23.1, so we are thrilled that the story has been selected for New Stories from the Midwest 2012 (Indiana University Press), guest edited by Rosellen Brown.
The forthcoming New Stories from the Midwest 2011 will include contributions from Charles Baxter, Christine Sneed, Dan Chaon, Rebbeca Makkai and Anthony Doerr. We think Greg’s story will find a nice comfortable spot in equally good company in the 2012 edition.
Order a copy of Issue 23.1 for a look into some great writing from the Midwest and beyond. Take a look at an excerpt of the story and a short interview with Greg Schutz if you need any more convincing.
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by Conor Broughan, Fiction Editor
 It’s been exhausting trying to keep up with Edith Pearlman lately. She contributed a wonderful story, “Last Words,” in issue 23.1 before publishing her collection of new and selected stories Binocular Vision. After receiving the Pen/Malamud Prize for short fiction, she was nominated as a National Book Award finalist. The finalists for the National Book Critics Circle awards were announced this weekend and guess who is a finalist: Edith Pearlman. Pick up your copy of issue 23.1 today and read “Last Words” to see what all the fuss is about.
If you live within shouting distance of West Lafayette, be sure to join us on Tuesday, March 27th when we’ll be honored to have Edith Pearlman on campus for a reading and Q&A session. I have a feeling …MORE
by Jacob Sunderlin, Co-Editor of Poetry
Ron Padgett, poet, author of some twenty volumes, memoirist, collaborator, badass, septuagenarian, translator, Okie, grandfather, has earned himself the right to start a poem thusly:
There’s not a lot of time to think when one is assailed by activities and obligations and even less time to do it when one is free of them because then one spends one’s time thinking about how little time there is.
Sometimes, when talking about poems, poets, or recent collections with poet friends, I’ll try and distinguish between poets I like “as a writer of poems” (read: poets whose techniques I find “fresh,” whose “voice” I respect, whose “language” is “interesting”) and poets whose work I like “as a Jacob” (read: poets I want to drink for breakfast). This is sometimes an unpopular (read: schizophrenic) perspective, but—for me—is the …MORE
 by Jacob Sunderlin, Co-Editor of Poetry
When I was seventeen, I ganked the Outlaw Bible of American Poetry from the public library and found three poems by David Trinidad anthologized between Bob Kaufman and Woody Guthrie. This was—to my mind—pretty much the coolest thing ever. In his newly-published and completely-addictive Dear Prudence: New and Selected Poems, Trinidad has given us a prismatic funhouse of contemporary poetry, full of Yardley Slicker lipgloss, NRFB (never removed from box) collectible Barbie outfits, and Sylvia Plath. In this cultural detritus, Trinidad finds something thrilling, something human, and a poetry as formally unexpected and inventive as its subjects. He was kind enough to speak with Sycamore Review recently and discuss some his most recent projects.
Sycamore Review: This was a big year for you—your selected poems were published, as well as the …MORE
 by Rob Davidson
Every good story collection has its governing metaphors, those common notes that blend the individual crooners into a concert of voices singing harmony. Restlessness defines the spirited characters in Patricia Henley’s fine new collection of short fiction, Other Heartbreaks. In these stories, people’s lives break down and are reassembled; there are changes of allegiance and sexual orientation; there are moments of great sweetness and moments of insufferable loss. As one narrator puts it, these are tales of “broken hearts, mended hearts, eternal stories of love lost and gained.”
Henley moves across the territories of her stories with deceptive ease, ranging back and forth in time, layering with moves both small and large, gradually filling in the context for a dramatic present that is always tied in interesting and complicated ways to the past. Henley’s stories require …MORE
By Jessica Jacobs, Editor-in-Chief
 After Sycamore editors carefully culled 20 finalists from a Wabash Contest record of nearly 600 entries, former U.S. Poet Laureate Louise Glück has selected Maya Jewell Zeller and her poem “Caterpillars” as the winner of this year’s Wabash Prize for Poetry. Glück also chose Carrie Causey and her poem “Woman in the Wall” as this year’s contest runner-up. Both of these poems will be showcased in Issue 24.1, Winter/Spring 2011, along with work from selected finalists.
Thanks to all who submitted. We hope you will continue to support and enjoy Sycamore and will consider submitting your work to the 2012 Wabash Prize for Poetry next year.
Complete Results: 2011 Wabash Poetry Prize
Winner:
Maya Jewell Zeller
First Runner-Up:
Carrie Causey
Second Runner-Up:
Michael Tyrell
Third Runner-Up:
Grace Marie Grafton
Finalists: Terry Blackhawk Sage Cohen …MORE
 by Conor Broughan
It’s been a big year for Issue 23.1 contributor Edith Pearlman. In January, Lookout Books published Binocular Vision, a career spanning collection of new and selected stories. In June, she received the prestigious Pen/Malamud Award by the Pen/Faulkner Foundation. Today, the National Book Foundation announced that Binocular Vision is finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. Congratulations!
Oh yeah…she also contributed her wild and wonderful “Last Words” in Sycamore Review’s Winter/Spring 2011 issue. Be sure to check out our review of Binocular Vision and interview with Edith Pearlman before you pick up your own copy of Issue 23.1 here.
by Lindsey Alexander, Visiting Writers Series Coordinator
More than 120 people crowded Krannert Auditorium to hear Mary Leader read from her latest collection, Beyond the Fire, last week. These poems explore themes of heritage—Leader’s hometown, Pawnee, Oklahoma, appears in the text—but also feminism, romantic love, and family. Alternating wonderfully personal moments of self-doubt with voices that seem to come from “anonymous scribes,” Leader shared with her audience the new expressions possible in her experimental poetic forms.
Her poem “They Vibrate,” which replicates the texture of woven art and blurs the sound and appearance of pairs of words across many different lines, was projected on a screen behind her during the reading.
Leader said her obsession with the colors red and blue, as well as their optic effects on the mind, has seeped into Beyond the Fire. In the Q and A, the colors and visual textures in her …MORE
 by Conor Broughan
Patricia Henley, a faculty member in the Purdue creative writing program, has a new collection of short stories Other Heartbreaks that will be published on October 11, 2011. She recently wrote a post on the Glimmer Train website about her publishing experience for this book.
Robert Olen Butler called Henley’s new collection “splendid” and that “the sweet sadness of life shimmers in these tales. Patricia Henley is one of our culture’s finest chroniclers of the human heart.”
Check out the book trailer for Other Heartbreaks and be sure to pick it up at your local bookstore or Engine Books on October 11th.
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I take Szymborska’s lead when I say the hardest sentence of an elegiac blog post is the first. Well, now that one’s behind me.
