News:
~ My full-length collection, Kingdom Come, will be published in 2010 by C & R Press.
~ A brief review of Breakfast with Blake by Glynn Young at TweetSpeak.
~ Eating Her Wedding Dress, an anthology of poems on clothes, is now available.
~ Thanks to the Tusculum Review for making me the first featured artist at their new website.
Tusculum Review Online
Artist statement:"The one and the many are one and the same"
Poem: "To a young poet, workshopped"
BlazeV0X
"He leads the way for his sons to follow," "Nothing the matter with the instrument; it's the body.," and "Tripping the plexal chakra," Spring 2008Ars Interpres
Literary Imagination
”Symptomatic, asymptotic” and
”Now Playing: Saddam Hussein as Thane of Cawdor,” Fall 2007
DIAGRAM
"C-section"Not Just Air 7
"Funeral games," Fall 2007
Not Just Air 6
Chronogram
“Mantlepiece,” March 2007
CipherJournal
DIAGRAM
Not Just Air 5
"Saving the day" and "Event horizon"Packingtown Review
The Old English Rune Poem (selections), 2010Iron Horse Literary Review
"Stet," 2009The Literary Review
"The male gaze" and "Ora pro nobis," 2010subTerrain
"Marriage and departure, departure and marriage," 2009The Southern Review
"Country matters," 2010Dos Passos Review
"my last fetus," 2009Makeout Creek
"Macculate conception," summer 2009New Orleans Review
"St. Francis reads the Kama Sutra" and "Useful fictions," 2009Plains Song Review
"Emptied term," Spring 2009Copper Nickel
"A list of what is found," "Stray paragraphs, February, year of the rat," and "On this day in 1805," 2009Eating Her Wedding Dress: A Collection of Clothing Poems
"A few chemicals mixed together and flesh and blood and bone just fade away!"Cream City Review
"Notes toward an introduction for Charles Simic," 2009AGNI
"I foresee the breaking of all that is breakable," 2009Tusculum Review Online
Artist statement:"The one and the many are one and the same"
Poem: "To a young poet, workshopped"
inscape
"Purpose-built from household objects," "A ticket to Obiralovka," and the essay "A space for the marvelous and the murderous," 2009The Portland Review
"A kind of retinal registration," 2009The Tusculum Review
"School of prophets," "Shanti Shanti Shanti" and "Tourism superorganic," 2009Packingtown Review
"Resolution," Fall 2008Ecopoetics
"Mantlepiece," and "Pop goes the agitprop," Fall 2008Observable Readings
St. Louis, MissouriSchlafly Bottleworks, 8 p.m.
Eighth Day Books
Wichita, KansasAugust 7, 2009
c. 7 p.m.
Purchase College
White Plains, NYTuesday, April 28, 12 p.m.
Poetry Society of America
The New SchoolNew York City
April 28, 2009
About Swerve
Winner of a 2008 National Chapbook Fellowship from the Poetry Society of America, chosen by C. K. Williams
“John Estes has a formidable sense of the music of poetry, a command of its resources so certain that he can play and display his verbal gifts with, when he wishes, a headlong dexterity. His poems can also be funny, and sad, as aware of mortality and grief as only the best playful poets can be, and intellectually serious.
“Many of the poems in Swerve are in the tradition of what might be called the domestic sublime, which usually consists of meticulously observed recountings of the mores and morals of individuals in intimate situations, particularly family relations, and their emotional and intellectual repercussions. The aesthetic opportunities of poems in this tradition, from Lowell and Plath to Olds, and reaching back to Coleridge and Wordsworth, pivot on such dramatic observations out into more resonant, philosophical and spiritual awarenesses; there is often a pressing urge for the poetic consciousness to suspend meaning and value between the particular and the general in just the way Estes does so well.” ~ From the Introduction
About the Book
Runner up, 2007 Brushfire Chapbook Award, judged by Ilya Kaminsky"Fathers—biological, spiritual, aesthetic—and sons populate these complex, allusive, sharply crafted, and probing poems. In them Estes asks nothing less than: For what do we live and for what are we willing to die? Their satisfying mix of high and low dictions, the mythic and familiar, the sacred and sexy re-invigorates these age-old questions—and, appropriately, it is Sappho who provides the age-old answer, which is: Desire." --Kathy Fagan
"These are the texts of a lost literacy. These poems make me want to weep." --Joseph Duemer