A Publication of Humanities Tennessee

Poetry

“This Brilliant Light Around the Corner”

By Margaret Renkl

January 6, 2012 In honor of the achievements of Eleanor Ross Taylor, and to mark her passing last Friday, Chapter 16 contacted poets and novelists around the country to ask for their impressions of a writer who spent much of her literary life in the shadow of her husband, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Peter Taylor, but who quietly continued her own work with passion and dedication during their fifty-one years together—and for more than a decade beyond his death. Through the comments of Betty Adcock, Richard Bausch, Claudia Emerson, Mark Jarman, Don Share, Dave Smith, and R.T. Smith, what emerges is a collaborative portrait of a woman who was quiet, modest, and gentle but whose poems were uncompromising, sharp, and (in a word that comes up again and again) fierce.

The Busy Memphian

By Maria Browning

December 14, 2011 With four new books published in 2011, including two short-story collections (Notes Toward the Story and Other Stories and I’ll Give You Something to Cry About), a novel (Gardner Remembers) and a volume of poetry (Before the Great Troubling), Memphis author and bookseller Corey Mesler has had a very busy year. Chapter 16 surveys the wealth of his words.

“Weaves a Clear Night”

By Charlotte Pence

November 29, 2011 Set in modern-day Appalachia, Charlotte Pence’s new chapbook—Weaves a Clear Night, winner of the 2011 Flying Trout Press Chapbook Prize—recasts the myths surrounding Penelope’s fidelity to Odysseus. Lyrical, meditative, and deeply sensual, the poems follow the emotional isolation of a woman poised between two men, neither of whom can be a part of her daily life. Despite the absence of the lover and the husband, their presence surrounds her.

A License to Lie

By Charlotte Pence

November 11, 2011 Internationally acclaimed journalist, poet, and playwright Antjie Krog was born into a family of Afrikaner writers and grew up on a farm within a conservative Afrikaans-speaking community. She published her first book at age seventeen and since then has continued to write groundbreaking work about South African injustices. On November 15 and 16, she will give a lecture and a poetry reading in Memphis at Rhodes College. Both events are free and open to the public.

A License to Lie

"New Heavens, New Earth"

By Melissa Range

November 4, 2011 Melissa Range’s first book of poems, Horse and Rider, was a finalist for the 2011 Kate Tufts Discovery Prize and won the 2010 Walt McDonald Prize in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The Hudson Review, New England Review, and others. She is a recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and a “Discovery” / The Nation prize, and she has held residencies at Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. A graduate of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, she is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in English and creative writing at the University of Missouri. “New Heavens, New Earth” originally appeared in Poetry London in 2006. Range will give a reading at the Hodges Library on the University of Tennessee campus in Knoxville on November 7 at 7 p.m. She will also appear (with Darius Antwan Stewart and Clay Matthews) at Rogers-Stout Hall on the campus of East Tennessee State University on November 8 at 7 p.m.

"After 42 Years"

By Khaled Mattawa

October 26, 2011 When Muammar Gaddafi’s forces took over Libya, Khaled Mattawa was thirteen. Now the acclaimed poet and translator (and a graduate of the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga) considers the death of the dictator:

Visit the Poetry archives chronologically below or search for an article

TAKE THE SHORT READER SURVEY! CHAPTER 16 SURVEYOR SURVEYING