You’re talking about grief. This is different, how the sky lost a single stitch and paid the earth a debt of silver, a fortune in nickels bruising the summer fruit. Today the trains collapsed into prayer, the river spat up its mudbed like a fevered child. Witness the shapeless effigy. The stars knocked loose from God’s mouth, cities drained dead of color, futile in stop and go monotone. I'm saying the dogwoods cried themselves sterile and still my friend is gone.
"A grant awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts is funding Shakespeare education in juvenile justice centers, creating a new and experimental initiative for the Illinois youth prison system. The program comes as advocates push for educational programming in juvenile justice systems that address poverty, trauma and educational gaps that result in incarceration."
“In Welish’s work I saw an embrace of the most wild, abstract and observational in Stevens, informed with her renewed freshness in constructing the image and its possible abstract correlative. She creates her own set of notes in her poems. Her book The Windows Flew Open broadened my universe of what the poem could be and hold as its subject: a language fueled from living in the mind."
