Laura featured my poetry last year during her National Poetry Month virtual road trip at the blog Author Amok with a look at my poem, “Winged Vessel.” I’ll get to meet Laura Shovan and other contributors to LPR’s Winter 2012 issue: Social Justice this Saturday, January 28 at the launch reading for this new issue. Especially eager to read offerings from Clarinda Harriss, Emily Severance, Jeff Fearnside and Martín Espada. Thank you to guest editor Truth Thomas for including my poem, “Advisory.”

including “Bank Lobby Poem” in PoetsArtists#30, alongside stunning figurative paintings assembled by mega-editor Dulce Menendez, and a feature by Grace Cavalieri on Charles Bernstein, cover boy.

My poetry feature at Connotation Press includes fun interview questions from Kaite Hillenbrand, CP poetry editor. Happy to offer these and hope you’ll enjoy. Best wishes for the holidays. Now I will go wrestle with my decision to make Christmas cards.

The DR is a regional review, although the 33 authors in Volume 4 come from eight states, DC, and the Ukraine. I was charmed by the Eastern Shore flavor of this volume and three poems in particular.

Wendy Ingersoll’s portfolio of poems about her dad, who grew up along an Eastern Shore river, ends with a colorful monologue, “Tell Us About the River, Dad,” his description of crabbing and oystering at low tide, when “a northwest wind/ blew the water clear out of the bay…”

The title of Linda Blaskey’s “Two Days at Shipping Creek” engages my interest in our peninsula’s place names. The poet’s emotional turmoil, from the Adirondack chair overlooking Oyster Cove, is just a ...]]> http://joannbalingit.org/2011/news/some-poems-from-the-delmarva-review-volume-4/feed/ 0 http://joannbalingit.org/2011/news/the-delmarva-review-and-poet-lore/ http://joannbalingit.org/2011/news/the-delmarva-review-and-poet-lore/#comments Thu, 20 Oct 2011 00:04:51 +0000 jbalingit http://joannbalingit.org/?p=228 The Delmarva Review,  with my review of the Spring/Summer 2011 issue of Poet Lore :  

Poet Lore: A 2nd Century of New Writing, 106: 1-2 (Spring/Summer 2011) $10.00
The editors of the 122-year-old Poet Lore carry on its tradition: work by little-known and well-known writers side-by-side. Two poems on facing pages I enjoyed are “Dr. Chute’s Secret Journal, 3/22/03” by Robert M. Chute and “Incoming Prayer” by Leonard Gontarek. Both poems, wry and personable in tone, use abstracted landscape and conversation to render a moral dilemma: to determine one’s responsibility for war from a position of minor power. Chute is new to me though little-known here does not mean beginner or emerging. Gontarek’s language is interior, both sharp and suave; I like reading him juxtaposed with others.

The pleasure of a well-edited journal is juxtaposition: the editorial work displayed. The ...]]> http://joannbalingit.org/2011/news/the-delmarva-review-and-poet-lore/feed/ 0 http://joannbalingit.org/2011/books/forage/ http://joannbalingit.org/2011/books/forage/#comments Thu, 13 Oct 2011 17:19:59 +0000 Josh http://joannbalingit.org/?p=188 In “leaflight, earthlight,” JoAnn Balingit composes poems that forage beautifully to find what will suffice.        — Arthur Sze, author of The Redshifting Web and The Ginkgo Light

JoAnn Balingit’s Forage is a passionate and heartbreaking collection. Often grounded in the natural world, Balingit’s lush imagery and sure music reverberate throughout these poems. Her prosody is as crisp and unflinching as Sylvia Plath’s in lines like “my mother glints like a polished shield.” I am smitten by this small collection of poems that explodes from a huge heart foraging through a complex family history (Filipino/ Anglo) punctuated by misunderstanding, loss and struggle, and arriving at what we call love, then finally, grace.                                                                                                                                   — Pamela Uschuk, author of Crazy Love

With photographs accompanying 73 poems, stories and essays by internationally known poets and storytellers to emerging writers who share their love for what makes Southern Delaware special to residents and visitors alike.   All proceeds benefit the Lewes (DE) Public Library, host to the annual Lewis Creative Artists Conference. Edited by Billie Travalini, author of Bloodsisters.

Order No Place Like Here from Friends of the Lewes Library. All proceeds benefit the Lewes Library.

Fine citizens of the art, the state poets work tirelessly to advocate for the joys, comforts, and subtleties of poetry as a means not just for self expression, but for communicating our very best thoughts to each other.”  –Kevin Prufer, Editor-at-large, Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing and Professor, Creative Writing, University of Houston

An Endless Skyway collects the State Poets Laureate from across America. And what a rich and wonderful chorus of voices it creates! Open these pages and enjoy the journey.      –Ted Kooser, United States Poet Laureate (2004-2006)

See featured poets and link to purchase An Endless Skyway.

In 1848, the “First Wave” of Asian immigration arrived in the United States. By the first decade of the 21st century, Asian Americans were the nation’s fastest growing racial group. Through a far-ranging array of primary source documents, Voices of the Asian American and Pacific Islander Experience shares what it was like for these diverse peoples to live and work in the United States, for better and for worse. Edited by Sang Chi and Emily Moberg Robinson, Greenwood, (February 2012).

‘Morning, Walking Home,’ ends, ‘Good morning, hands—/ you awake?  My sandal strap’s/ undone. My heart/ hardly buckled on.’ It’s that slight lurch, both in rhythm and in tone, that I love in JoAnn Balingit’s poems. They deconstruct love’s clichés, shrewdly celebrating the heart as a live object, more vulnerable and complicated than a machine, pumping blood also to itself. This is a poet who possesses both wisdom and talent. Our poetic landscape is richer for her presence.”                             –Fleda Brown, author of Driving With Dvořák and Loon Cry

“In these resonant poems, JoAnn Balingit shows us what is possible when the poet-mother, poet-wife, poet-poet allows herself to be gratefully confounded—allows herself, as Rilke told us, to ...]]> http://joannbalingit.org/2009/books/your-heart-and-how-it-works/feed/ 0 http://joannbalingit.org/2008/delaware-anthologies/on-the-mason-dixon-line-an-anthology-of-contemporary-delaware-writers/ http://joannbalingit.org/2008/delaware-anthologies/on-the-mason-dixon-line-an-anthology-of-contemporary-delaware-writers/#comments Mon, 06 Oct 2008 22:31:53 +0000 Josh http://joannbalingit.org/?p=32 “If Delaware has anything to say about it, literature is flourishing.

The stories, poems, and essays collected in On the Mason-Dixon Line reflect the tensions of residing in (or hailing from) this ‘next to smallest of states,’ where a southern drawl is as ubiquitous as the faster-paced consonants of Philadelphia. With one foot in the South, the other in the North, each of these forty-five writers presents a distinct voice, blending the place names of the past with the emotional geographies of the present. Under the careful orchestration of astute editors, the resulting mix–urban and rural, comic and tragic, informative and imaginative–rises to the universal.”  –Judith Kitchen, essayist, novelist, editor, critic

Edited by Billie Travalini and Fleda Brown. University of Delaware Press, 2008.