Tag: The Poetry Break

The Poetry Break: Jayne Anne Phillips

Jayne Anne Phillips is one of the finest novelists living in America today. Her many books have garnered honors that include being a finalist for the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award, short listed for the prestigious Orange Prize, one of the Best Books of the Year by Publishers Weekly, a New York Times Best Seller and many, many others.

"These prose poems of Jayne Anne's reveal the little miracles that take place in the most common experiences," Harshman said.

Born and raised in WV, her work never fails to reveals her deep Appalachian roots with an honesty and power achieved by few others. Best known for her fiction, she is, as well, the author of a marvelous early book of prose poems titled SWEETHEARTS.

  • Sweethearts
  • Toad
  • A Few Feet Away

The Poetry Break: Jeff Mann

Raised in Covington, Virginia, and Hinton West Virginia, Jeff Mann is an author of novels, essays, short fiction, a memoir, and poems. 

A significant portion of his work examines the LGBTQ experience, especially as witnessed in Appalachia. He’s won many awards for his work including a Rainbow Award for Purgatory: A Novel of the Civil War, as well as the John Preston Short Fiction Award and many others. 

Mann is currently associate professor in creative writing at Virginia Tech.

“There was a vividness of the language, concreteness of detail, lyrical, darkly erotic and compelling poems,” Harshman said of Mann's poetry.

Found here with permission from Rebel Satori Press, two poems from Ash: Poems from Norse Mythology, and with permission from Gival Press, two poems from On the Tongue.

  • “Before the Norns”
  • “Alba”
  • “Dove”
  • “Ashes”

The Poetry Break: Maggie Anderson

This month’s Poetry Break features the work of Maggie Anderson.

“Maggie Anderson is that rare gift [to all writers] in that she is held in equal esteem as not only a superlative poet but a superlative teacher,” said March Harshman.  “Professor Emerita and past Director of the Wick Poetry Program at Kent State University, she is the author of many highly acclaimed volumes of poetry.”

Anderson’s honors included two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as grants from the MacDowell Colony and an Isabella Gardner fellowship.  

"Although a widely traveled poet possessing poems of great sophistication and craft," said Harshman, "her work is rarely far from her family roots in West Virginia either in sensibility or specific setting."

Featured Poems:

  • Spitting in the Leaves
  • Related to Sky
  • The Thing You Must Remember
  • Report from Here

These poems are from the book Windfall: New and Selected Poems by Maggie Anderson, 2000. Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.

The Poetry Break: Robert Morgan

Robert Morgan is a native of the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Essayist, novelist, teacher, short-story author, poet, and “an unassuming…

Robert Morgan is a native of the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Essayist, novelist, teacher, short-story author, poet, and “an unassuming gentleman and a friend to artists everywhere,” Harshman said. His novel Gap Creek was a selection of the Oprah Book Club and a New York Times Best Seller.

Featured here:  

  • Blackberries
  • Plank Road
  • Blue Ridge
  • Family
  • The Flying Snake

These selections are pulled from Groundwork (Gnomon Press, Frankfort, KY, 1979) and from The Strange Attractor: New and Selected Poems (Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 2004).

"He's able to tell a story so well," Marc Harshman said of poet Robert Morgan.

The Poetry Break: Louise McNeill

West Virginia Poet Laureate Marc Harshman delivers the poetry of his predecessor’s predecessor in this Poetry Break, Louise McNeill.

“I know I’m in the presence of a truly superior poet when   I go back and rediscover poems and realize how amazingly timely they still are,” said host and curator Marc Harshman. 

In this Poetry Break we hear selections drawn from the book Hill Daughter New and Selected Poems published in 1991 by the University of Pittsburgh Press.

  • First Flight
  • West Virginia
  • The Great Depression
  • Depression Wind
  • Garden Moment

The Poetry Break: Irene McKinney

West Virginia Poet Laureate Marc Harshman delivers the poetry of his predecessor in this Poetry Break. Irene McKinney was a remarkable woman, greatly…

West Virginia Poet Laureate Marc Harshman delivers the poetry of his predecessor in this Poetry Break. Irene McKinney was a remarkable woman, greatly admired as a poet and teacher, ” Harshman said. “She was the kind of poet who could accomplish in a few seconds that deep trust with her readers that compel them to follow her words.” 

In this Poetry Break we hear three selection s from Vivid Companion, published by Vandalia Press of West Virginia University:

  • Personal
  • Ready
  • At 24
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