For the last several months, I’ve been part of the Poets’ Quarterly team as a contributing editor, and I’ve had a blast. The new issue is live and features a lot of solid content, including an interesting essay about e-poetry, an interview with Jane Hirshfield, an interview with Molly Fisk, and several other reviews, essays, and interviews. For this issue, I worked on two reviews, including Looking for the Gulf Motel by Richard Blanco, who is slowly becoming one of my favorite contemporary American poets, and another review on A Change in the Weather by Geoffrey Jacques. I was exposed to this book during one of my Ph.D. classes at Binghamton University this semester. Jacques’ book makes the claim that the most well-known modernist writers, including Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, and T.S. Eliot, owe a huge debt to black culture. The book came out a few years ago, and I am waiting for Jacques’ theories to spark greater debate, which is one reason I wanted to review the book. His ideas are worth considering because they challenge the modernist canon.

Check out the rest of the issue and enjoy it.