Helen Sullivan for London's Guardian. Dragonflies have a near-perfect hunting record, successfully grabbing their prey in mid-air 95% of the time: they do this while flying skywards, earthwards, side to side, backwards and upside down. In one experiment, a dragonfly with numbers drawn on its clear wings alights backwards from a reed, legs raised above its head…
Ae Hee Lee is the author of two poetry chapbooks:
Bedtime || Riverbed (Compound Press, 2017) and
Dear bear, (Platypus Press, 2021). She holds an MFA from the University of Notre Dame and is a PhD candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her work has been published or is forthcoming at the New England Review, Narrative, Denver Quarterly, Southeast Review, and POETRY among others. She has also received scholarships and awards from the Academy of American Poets, AWP, the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, and the Glen Workshop.
INTRODUCTION
It took me a while to realize reading and writing were just another way of listening and engaging in conversation with people (myself included!), ideas, and sounds. However, one of the things I love about paper is its boundless patience. It respects that every reader and writer has their own pace (some run, others wade). Therefore, if I were to offer some advice to my younger self, I would tell her i
This is the final installment of Nina MacLaughlin’s column Winter Solstice.
It’s dark. I am up early enough to see the stars. The porch light on the house across the street shines bright enough to bring shadows into the room. The neighborhood is still. The rattling newspaper delivery truck has not yet been by, the morning news not yet tossed on stoops. Frost not dew, the grass is stiff; a woman scrapes ice off her windshield and I feel it in my teeth. Mothwinged darkness opens itself widest now. Today is the shortest day of the year.
Wasn’t it just summer?
Chelsea Dingman’s first book,
Thaw, was chosen by Allison Joseph to win the National Poetry Series (University of Georgia Press, 2017). Her second poetry collection,
Through a Small Ghost, won The Georgia Poetry Prize (University of Georgia Press, 2020). She is also the author of the chapbook,
What Bodies Have I Moved (Madhouse Press, 2018)
. Visit her website www.chelseadingman.com.
INTRODUCTION
If I could tell my younger self one thing about being a poet, it is simply that a writer is someone who writes. That the interaction with the page, that relationship that I’ve valued and trusted my whole life, is the most important relationship that I have, whether it is my work on the page, or the work of someone else. Sometimes, I only have scraps of time to engage in reading and writing. I am taking notes on my phone in traffic, or reading a collection of a few poems at a time in the early morning while my kids are still sleeping. But this engagement is life-sustaining.