When The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 arrived in my mailbox numbering 769 pages, I was astonished but not surprised at the heft of the book. Great poets aren’t just born. By amassing words, they mature and develop, perfecting their voice and style. One of the pleasures that I found in reading this book was […]
Read More…Lucille Clifton lived in Columbia, Maryland, where Little Patuxent Review is published. In 1979, Lucille became the second woman and first African-American to serve as Poet Laureate of Maryland. In 1988, she was a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry finalist for Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980 and Next: New Poems. In 2000, she received the National Book Foundation Poetry Award for Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, 1988-2000. […]
Read More…A journal like Little Patuxent Review requires a vibrant literary and artistic community to thrive–and even survive. In appreciation of the cultural entities around us, we present “Meet the Neighbors,” a series where we provide you with personal introductions. The term “CityLit” kept coming up. When Laura Shovan was tapped to be LPR editor some months before this […]
Read More…I live in an 1830s mill worker’s house on the Patapsco River in the picture-postcard part of Ellicott City, MD. A year ago, Truth Thomas, guest editor for our Winter 2012 Social Justice issue, sat at my dining room table. Before we got down to business with Linda Joy Burke, an LPR contributing editor, two things occurred. […]
Read More…When I find myself unaccountably crying as I reach the end of a collection of poems, when the combined weight of the poet’s felt human presence and the loss seeping through the poems brings tears, I know something powerful is about. This happened as I read one of the last poems,“The Last Out,” in Dan Gutstein’s Bloodcoal […]
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