Any writer who desires to get at the truth of human experience should read poetry, because it contains a multitude of possibility. Poetry is the mud that grows the seed that becomes the forest. It is the clay that makes the brick that forms the building. It is the blood that moves the body that [...]

Last week’s feature was Van Jordan’s new book of poetry, The Cineaste, and we’re pleased to announce the winners:

Glenn H. Myers (@glennhmyers)
Doug Lawson (@douglawson)
Stacy Faulk (@kiokokitten)

Congrats! To claim your free copy, please email us at the following address:
winners [at] fictionwritersreview.com
If you’d like to be eligible for future giveaways, please visit our Twitter Page and “follow” [...]

This week’s feature is A. Van Jordan’s new book of poetry, The Cineaste, which was just published by W.W. Norton. The book merges the form and content of an obsession, film, to produce poems tracking the inner lives of movie viewers, the career of early black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux, the story of the Leo Frank [...]

Poetry—it isn’t just for poets! In her latest column, Katie Umans recommends straying from fiction with the following books: Kingdom Animalia, Something in the Potato Room, Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie, and Lucky Fish.

In conversation with Julie Judkins, author Scott Nadelson discusses how the “mad mystic hammering” of Bob Dylan inspired him to become a writer, why being a formerly reluctant reader informs his teaching, and how New Jersey has evolved in his fiction from an actual place to a state of being.

Why did I feel such hope when I first heard about David Orr’s new book, Beautiful and Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry? I’ve read my share of poetry guides, and most of them have taken up residence in a particularly dusty neighborhood on my poetry bookshelf. But Orr’s book had a title that pretty much summed up my own weary but hopeful sentiments about contemporary poetry.

Fiction writers are sometimes the first to prostrate themselves and say they don’t get poetry, but these five recommendations have been hand-picked for prosers: Post Moxie by Julia Story, Thin Kimono by Michael Earl Craig, Noose and Hook by Lynn Emanuel, The Madeleine Poems by Paul Legault, and American Fanatics by Dorothy Barresi.

In a landscape crowded with brand-new literary mags – which are always exciting to FWR – we want to give a shout out to an old stalwart: Ploughshares. Started in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1971, Ploughshares has called Emerson College home for the past two decades. Several Fiction Writers Review contributors have had work appear in [...]

Jennifer Solheim weaves the story of her decade-long translation of Yolaine Simha’s I Saw You on the Street into a meditation on the nature of the translator’s labor. Solheim looks at history, politics, time and rereading to parse how “translation can become a snake biting its own tail: the translator as writer and reader is simultaneously subsumed and resurrected by the text in the original.”

All across the blogosphere, writers have been celebrating April 2010 by discussing poems and sharing recommendations, including work of their own.
- At Powell’s Blog, Jae suggests three collections (including Alphabet by Inger Christensen), observing:
The poetry section of a bookstore can present potential challenges for any reader. More often than not, poetry books are precociously [...]