By the time this year’s Pulitzer Prize in Fiction was announced on April 15 — it went to Adam Johnson’s novel The Orphan Master’s Son — a band of enterprising poets around the world were already halfway to their goal of creating 2500 poems from the Pulitzer’s back catalog. They’ve been incorporating text from the 85 previous prizewinning novels into their own work as part of a National Poetry Month initiative called Pulitzer Remix.... Read more

Heavenly Bodies is a recent collection of poems, and a 2012 National Book Award finalist, by Post Mills poet and Dartmouth College professor Cynthia Huntington. Much of it reckons with the repercussions and lingering effects of the upheavals of the 1960s. Huntington writes, “It is 1967 late in the empire of America / Years pass, and it is always this time / we wait listening / for the silence after things stop falling.” ... Read more

Poetry readers will recognize the names of New Directions Publishing in New York, Copper Canyon Press in Washington and City Lights Books in California — all long-standing small publishers that have had a huge impact on contemporary poetry.... Read more

One of the thoughts running through Matthew Powers’ mind last January, as he observed more than 200 people joining arms in a “hug” outside the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum, was Who knew this little building on the hill could command so much attention? And, he asked rhetorically during a recent interview, “How many directors have had the experience of a crowd of people showing up, on short notice, to encircle the whole place?”... Read more

Wishes are those fanciful things we have as children (à la Disney’s “When You Wish Upon a Star...”). Wishes often contradict reason: When we grow up, we call them goals. Or intentions, or mission statements, or objectives. Mate the youthful “wish list” with the grown-up “to-do” list, and voilà: We have the “bucket list.” The mushy mix of desires triggered by celebrations such as New Year’s Eve and Valentine’s Day can leave some of us clutching tattered lists, eyeing stagnant resolutions and nursing our sweet-and-sour hearts.... Read more

Stop in at the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum any time before this Friday, and you’ll find business as usual: perhaps Bob Joly manning the circulation desk, head librarian Lisa von Kann staffing the second-floor desk, Gloria Molinaroli in the children’s library, and docent Elaine Garrison in the back gallery.... Read more

The 230 people who turned out last Saturday in solidarity with St. Johnsbury’s Athenaeum were not up in arms but rather arm in arm: Arriving from nearby and from as far away as Massachusetts, they formed a human chain around the building to show support for the eight library staff members whose layoffs from the financially strapped facility will take effect on February 1.... Read more

Saplings stuck in the bank will show the plow truck, in a month,

the road’s edge.

The torrential rains, wind. Later, after dawn, clotted flakes

cataract the skylight.

Her finger traces the valley of his back.

The windows are opaque with ice, fissure lines squiggle

like the seam where the plates of the human skull fuse.

Snow driven in the slice of space between the barn boards.

Snowflakes stick singly and doubly to a cow’s roan coat,

skewered to a hair.

 ... Read more