 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
By David Blomenberg, Reviews Editor
 There’s a certain renegade quality to the publishing of this book that resonates not only with the disposition of the activist poet it introduces to the English-reading public, but also chimes with Russia itself, the country whose health—both political and artistic—is always at the heart of Medvedev’s work. There’s a degree of lawlessness in the Russian mode that extends beyond internet scams and an entrepreneurially cavalier attitude toward copyright law. In 2004, Medvedev issued a “Manifesto on Copyright” on his website, declaring that anything he writes can only be “collected and edited according to the desires of the publisher, released in a PIRATE EDITION, that is to say, WITHOUT THE PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR, WITHOUT ANY CONTRACTS OR AGREEMENTS.” We can assume that UDP has held up its end of the bargain.
Among the pieces presented in this …MORE
by Dallas Woodburn, Fiction Editor
Sycamore Review is proud to announce that award-winning novelist, essayist, poet and short-story writer Charles Baxter will be selecting the winner of our 2013 Wabash Prize for Fiction. First prize is $1,000 and publication in the next issue of Sycamore Review.
Charles Baxter was born in Minneapolis and graduated from Macalester College in Saint Paul. After completing graduate work in English at the State University of New York at Buffalo, he taught for several years at Wayne State University in Detroit. In 1989, he moved to the Department of English at the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor and its MFA program. He now teaches at the University of Minnesota. Baxter is the author of five novels, including the National Book Award Finalist The Feast of Love; five collections of short …MORE
By Matt Kilbane, Poetry Co-Editor
We’re thrilled to announce that “What I Mean When I Say Elijah-Man,” by Geffrey Davis, has been selected by poet Nikky Finney to receive the 2012 Wabash Poetry Prize. We received hundreds of excellent submissions, and our weeks and weeks of reading only affirmed the vitality and breadth of the poetry under production in the US today. Congratulations to Geffrey, and thanks to all who entrusted their submissions to our care!
Geffrey’s poem, which will appear in the Sycamore Review’s Winter/Spring issue, dares to entwine issues of family and fealty with those of faith. We’re reminded that all hurt is necessarily verbed, always a “hurting” toward, and that only poise in the face of such driving pain makes poems. Even in our age of …MORE
By David Blomenberg, Reviews Editor
 One of the many things I look forward to toward the end of every year is the latest volume of Dalkey Archive’s Best European Fiction, now in its fourth year. Each November, I start looking for the notices and by December, the Alexandar Hemon-edited volume is usually in my hot little hands. Past issues have been my introduction to the wonderful work of new and established authors from all corners of Europe (when’s the last time you read short fiction from Macedonia?). The series could also be seen as a sort of sampler platter of the offerings that Dalkey Archive—a publisher specializing in literature in translation—has coming down the pike. For example, BEF 2011 was my first encounter with the luminous prose of Michal Ajvaz, whose The Other City and The Golden Age, also published …MORE
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By Matt Kilbane, Poetry Co-Editor
