I'm happy to have my review of Crooker's newest collection appearing in The Pedestal magazine's new issue. It's hard work, but I like book reviewing, which is a way of concentrating on poetry in an arc of expression, as a good collection must be. Here's my pull-quote from the review: "In these glass-half-empty times, Barbara Crooker takes a radical stance: she wants more. She celebrates the life of the senses in poems of praise, gratitude, and grief."
I had the recent pleasure of receiving an in-depth critique of a poem I'm working on and thought about the value of our connections as poets, how no one works in poetry, or in any art form, alone. The myth of the lone artist is just that: a myth. We must have lots of solitude, but we must also have lots of exchange, if only by studying one another's work and the work that's gone before. There is no solo planet for a poet. We are intertwined in this work.