Asheville Poetry Review

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lukehankins — Sat, 04 Dec 2010 06:56:48 +0000

You limp the way a stream
will soothe a single rock
and along the bottom

remembers this path
as darkness and dry leaves
though you don’t look down

—you hear it’s raining: the hush
not right now but at night
these cinders float to the surface

keep one foot swollen, the other
has so little and for a long time now
the listening in secret.

John Wood

dakrawiec — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 15:16:22 +0000

John Wood lives in Saxtons River, Vermont. He is a poet and critic whose
output includes more than twenty critical works and award-winning books
in both fields. He has published five books of poetry, including Endurance
and Suffering: Narratives of Disease in the Nineteenth Century (Edition
Galerie Vevais) and Selected Poems (University of Arkansas Press).

Daniel Westover

dakrawiec — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 15:14:59 +0000

Daniel Westover recently completed a Ph.D at the University of Wales on
the work of R. S. Thomas. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in
The North American Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Tar River
Poetry, and 21st. He teaches literature and creative writing at Westminster
College in Salt Lake City.

Paul Watsky

dakrawiec — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 15:13:44 +0000

Paul Watsky is a clinical psychologist and the co-translator, with Emiko
Miyashita, of Santoka (Tokyo, PIE Books, 2006), a book of translations of
Taneda Shoichi’s haiku, written under the pen name Santoka. His own
poems have been published in The Cream City Review, onthebus, and
Poetry Flash.

Virgil

dakrawiec — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 15:12:15 +0000

Virgil (70 B.C–19 B.C), regarded as the greatest Roman poet, is known for
his epic, The Aeneid (written about 29 B.C.E), which had taken its literary
model from Homer‘s epic poems Iliad and Odyssey. He was born on
October 15, 70 B.C.E., in a small village near Mantua in Northern Italy.
Publius Vergilius Maro, or Virgil, has influenced Western literature for two
millennia, but little is known about the man himself. His father was a
prosperous landowner, described variously as a “potter” and a “courier,”
who could afford thorough education for the future poet. Virgil attended
school at Cremona and Milan, and then went to Rome, where he studied
mathematics, medicine and rhetoric, and completed his studies in Naples.
He entered literary circles as an “Alexandrian,” the name given to a group
of poets who sought inspiration in the sophisticated work of third-century
Greek poets also known as Alexandrians. After the battle of Philippi in 42
B.C. Virgil’s property was confiscated for veterans. According to some
sources it was afterwards restored at the command of Octavian (later
styled Augustus). In the following years Virgil spent most of his time in
Campania and Sicily, but he had also a house at Rome. Between 42 and 37
B.C.E. Virgil composed pastoral poems known as Ecologues (‘rustic
poems’ and ‘selections’), spent years on the Georgics (literally, ‘pertaining
to agriculture’), a didactic work on farming, a townsman’s view of the
country. Augustus Caesar pressed Virgil to write of the glory of Rome
under his sway. Thus the remaining time of his life, from 30 to 19 B.C.,
Virgil devoted to the composition of The Aeneid, the national epic of
Rome, to glorify the Empire. By request Virgil accompanied the Emperor
to Megara and then to Italy, but the journey turned out to be fatal and the
poet died in 19 B.C of a fever in contracted on his visit to Greece. It is said
that the poet had instructed his executor Varius to destroy The Aeneid, but
Augustus ordered Varius to ignore this request, and the poem was published
to great acclaim.

Rafael Soto Verges

dakrawiec — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 15:08:48 +0000

Rafael Soto Verges was born in Cádiz, Spain in 1936, studied business and
liberal arts, and won the Adonais Award in 1958 for his book of poetry La
agorera (The Fortune-Teller). Among his many books of poetry are
Rimado bajo el piélago (Rhyme Book beneath the Sea, 1993, Cáceres City
Award), El discurso de yerba (Grass Speech, 1994, Andalusian Critics
Award), Manual de prodigios (Handbook of Miracles) Madrid: Devenir,
1999, which received the Vicente Gaos Award, 1997, and Pasto in llamas
(Pasture in Flames), Soria: Diputación Provincial, 2000, Leonor Poetry
Prize, 1999, and Las deleterias areas (The Lethal Areas, 2003, Andalusian
Aljabibe Award). Soto Vergés died in July, 2004. Spanish Critic Ricardo
Guillón declared in his Dictionary of Spanish and Spanish American
Literature that Soto Vergés was “one of the first to anticipate, through
symbolic empowering, the renovating formulas of the realism prevalent at
the end of the Fifties.” One English translation of a poem from the
Handbook appeared in Illuminations (2005), two in a 2003 issue of The
Bitter Oleander and five of these translations were featured in Madrid’s
multilingual poetry magazine, Equivalencias.

Alex To

dakrawiec — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 15:05:37 +0000

Alex To was born in China, spent his teenage years in Hong Kong, then at
18 emigrated to the United States. After finishing medical school in Boston,
he took a detour and went to work on Wall Street. For the past seventeen
years he has worked as a biotech analyst and hedge fund manager. He writes
poems in between his trades. Dr. To is a contributing editor of Fulcrum and
is also on the Board of Governors for the Poetry Society of America.

Christina Stoddard

dakrawiec — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 15:04:21 +0000

Christina Stoddard works at Vanderbilt University as Managing Editor of
The Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, a law and economics journal. She
earned her MFA from the University of NC-Greensboro, where she was
the first Fred Chappell fellowship recipient. Her work has previous been
published in Tar River Poetry, The Texas Review, Slipstream, and Southern
Indiana Review.

A. E. Stallings

dakrawiec — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 15:02:58 +0000

A. E. Stallings is an American poet currently residing in Athens, Greece.
She has published two collections of poetry, Archaic Smile and Hapax,
which won the 2008 Poets Prize. Her new verse translation of Lucretius,
The Nature of Things, was recently released by Penguin Classics.

Mark Smith-Soto

dakrawiec — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 15:01:22 +0000

Mark Smith-Soto grew up in Costa Rica and now lives in Greensboro,
North Carolina, where he serves as director of the Center for Creative
Writing in the Arts at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. His
translation of Ana Istarú’s selected poetry, Fever Season and Other Poems,
is due out this fall from Unicorn Press. He received a 2005 National
Endowment for the Arts fellowship in creative writing and his poems have
appeared in Nimrod, Carolina Quarterly, The Sun, Poetry East, Quarterly
West, Americas Review, Callaloo, Chattahoochee Review, Literary Review,
Kenyon Review and various other literary magazines. His chapbook Green
Mango Collage, was winner of the North Carolina Writers’ Network 2000
Persephone Competition, and published by Birch Brook Press. Another
poetry collection, Shafts, won the North Carolina Writers’ Network’s 2001
Randall Jarrell-Harperprints Poetry Competition. His first full-length book
of poetry, Our Lives Are Rivers, was published by Florida University Press
in 2003. His latest collection, Any Second Now, was released by Main
Street Rag Press in 2006. He is also editor of The International Poetry
Review.