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Say there was a list of fictitious literary locales you’d rather read about than visit. David Huddle’s Glory River would definitely be on it. True, it’s not Mordor or Dante’s Inferno — just a godforsaken Appalachian hamlet that makes the creepiest Southern Gothic burgs of Faulkner and Morrison seem livable by comparison.... Read more

It does Barton poet Leland Kinsey no disservice to say that his latest volume of poetry is as gripping a read as a great novel. The 57-year-old’s sixth book, The Immigrant’s Contract, is actually a series of linked poems narrated by the immigrant of the title — a French-Canadian, never named, who was still a boy when his father moved the family to an unidentified northern Vermont town.... Read more

In the poem that gives Angela Patten’s new collection its title, the fossilized tongue of St. Anthony sits under glass, a reminder of “the numinous particulars of flesh.” As it takes on a meaning beyond words, the severed tongue is a wry exemplar for these eloquent memories and telling details.... Read more

This spring, Wednesday evening visitors to UVM’s Fleming Museum can entertain their ears as well as their eyes. Hosted by English professor and acclaimed poet Major Jackson, the Painted Word Poetry Series brings two “established and emergent New England poets” to the Fleming on the last Wednesday of three successive months, starting February 27. Live jazz from local trio The Castaways will precede each 6:30 p.m. reading.... Read more

In recognition of the Winter Reading issue, this week’s column is devoted to nine Vermont books that we’d not had a chance to read, or review, until now. But before we get to them, congratulations are in order to New Yorker and Seven Days cartoonist-illustrator Harry Bliss: Time magazine has named his book Diary of a Fly, with writer Doreen Cronin, one of the top 10 children’s picture books of the year.

Props to all the Vermonters who published books this year; just getting the words onto the page is a feat. We can relate.... Read more

Water covers the streets of a nearly abandoned Manhattan. A couple huddles in their home under government quarantine after catching the plague from a stray cat. A weekend warrior desperately maintains his pristine lawn in the midst of a new suburban wilderness. A writer wonders how long he would survive doomsday holed up in Wal-Mart, “my one-stop-shopping ecosystem.”... Read more

There’s nothing particularly lyrical about what’s currently going on in Iraq. But in poet Brian Turner’s work, fleeting beauty emerges from devastation. The “embedded poet” has been lauded by The New York Times, The New Yorker and Salon.com for his collection Here, Bullet, in which he writes about his experiences as an infantry team leader in Iraq in 2003. This Thursday, the seven-year Army vet with an MFA will read his visceral verse at the St. Johnsbury Athenaum.... Read more

He was a professor famous for not giving As. A poker player who pranked his friends with whoopee cushions. A fly-fisherman, a dad, and a widely published poet who nearly won a Pulitzer. John Engels of Burlington passed away last June at the age of 76. Now the English department at St. Michael’s College, where Engels taught for the past 45 years, has come out with a special issue of its student-edited literary annual, The Onion River Review, devoted to “Remembering John Engels.”... Read more

On June 13, John Engels of Williston passed away at 76, after a long and distinguished career as a poet and educator. One of his sons, Matt Engels, says his father died as a result of two heart attacks in the aftermath of a back surgery.

A long-time professor at St. Michael’s College, Engels never retired; the college recently gave him an award for 45 years of service.... Read more

A conversational poem called "Whistling Past the Dead," by award-winning Denver poet Robert Cooperman. A short memoir of Oxycontin abuse from Champlain College student Amanda Northrop. A rhyming poem called "King Kong's Shoe Repair" by Ned Bratspis, a marriage counselor from Washington State. A verse memory of haying from Charlotte writer Kathleen McKinley Harris. A short story consisting almost entirely of dialogue over a game of chess, by Champlain student Jackie Bishop.... Read more