A NY Times ‘Best Poetry Book’
- A Piece of Good News: Poems
- By Katie Peterson, associate professor of English
Her fourth collection of poetry, named by The New York Times Book Review as . Said The Times: “Peterson’s prickly, playful book is filled with quasi parables (including a poem called “New Parable”) that often keep an attractive distance from their own sponsoring emotions — attractive in part because when Peterson chooses to narrow that gap, the results are striking.”
The publisher writes: “Imbued with a hallucinatory poetic logic where desire, anger and sorrow supplant intelligence and reason, these poems are powerful meditations of mourning, love, doubt, political citizenship and happiness.”
Audio: Peterson reads and
The interiors of motherhood
- For Hunger
- By Margaret Ronda, assistant professor of English
Her second book of poetry, a follow-up to Personification, winner of the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize, 2009. For Hunger offers what her publisher describes as “a fierce look at the interiors of motherhood, examining what it means to become a mother and lose a mother.” The publisher continued: “These intimate poems dwell in the drifts, uncanny repetitions, and shocks that characterize the strange temporality of loss.”
McPherson in Ploughshares
- “After Trauma”
- By Sandra McPherson, professor emerita of English
McPherson taught creative writing and poetry-as-literature courses at °ϲĻϢ Davis for 23 years. Before that, she taught for four years in the University of Iowa Writers Workshop, served as the Holloway Lecturer at °ϲĻϢ Berkeley and conducted several years of classes for the Oregon Writers Workshop/Pacific Northwest College of Art. She founded Swan Scythe Press, a poetry chapbook publishing venture, in 1999.
She has published numerous collections and has another one coming: Quicksilver, Cougars and Quartz, from Salmon Poetry Press.