I am reading one of the finest novels I will ever read, and it’s called Light Years. The writer is incomparable, James Salter.

"Berceuse Parish is equally fabulist and sincere, a rare combination. ...a book that is consistent in its experiments, committed to beauty, and interested in a multitudinous way of being in the world." New review of BERCEUSE PARISH by Burnside Soleil.

Grateful for this new review of my book. I have learned that my tactic for reading reviews of Berceuse is pretty much holding my breath and scanning quickly before settling in to admire someone who writes so attentively and insightfully.

Maybe this is symptomatic of elderly millennial energy, but I can no longer write or focus in a coffee shop.

I just finished an early copy I received of this book and you absolutely need to read it. It’s available for pre-order and I promise you will love it. I will be thinking about and returning to this collection a lot.

@burnsidesoleil.bsky.social on living with his characters and finding his narrator.

Funny to see some hometown folks quibble about my first book.

This interview was really fun. Thanks both to Tiana and NER.

Author’s notes? Often, the poems, I believe, would be improved, richer, if the lyric wrestled with the context appended in the book. Also, these poems are sometimes so slight, a few clever rhetorical maneuvers, but emotionally distant. Instead, incorporate the notes. Let us read the burden.

These are landscapes—are they landscapes? An extraordinary collection of interiors.

Donald Hall said you judge a poet only by their best works. If that’s true, then Rodney Jones is one of the finest American poets. I don’t think the man has written a dull line, each collection and each poem charged, funny, and expansive in its imagination and tenderness.

A poem asks for attention, not complete knowledge, from a reader.

This observation is too niche, useless, but in Donkey Gospel, Hoagland’s poems have the most interesting thinking in the second third. He prefers the neat, witty closing that he pulls off incredibly well. But the second third—compelled by the wondering and speculations there.

From Hass, I’ve learned that you can cultivate an overdetermined deep image, surrealistic and surprising, but if the rhythm of the line is just iambic, then are you really pushing the language forward?

I see many poems scattering lines across the page, space between one phrase or clause, which isn’t good or bad, or preferable or gauche, but when the syntax and the image don’t evoke striking musicality, the poem lacks tension, seems airy. Not that the form needs conflict. But maybe tension.

James Wright’s Shall We Gather at the River’s desolate atmosphere and dispossessed archetypal characters can seem like sentimentalized squalor, but the lines aren’t pathetic, even as the subjects are full of pathos.