David Shumate on When Words Become Thunder

“David Shumate’s High Water Mark is absolutely fresh and unpredictable. . . . You will be surprised by your confrontation with the utterly first rate.” — Jim Harrison David Shumate is the author of The Floating Bridge and High Water Mark, winner of the 2003 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. His poetry has appeared widely in literary journals and has been anthologized in Good Poems for Hard Times, The Best American Poetry and The Writer’s Almanac. Shumate is poet-in-residence at Marian University and lives in Zionsville, Indiana. David and I talk about poems that surprise you, the elemental essence that gardening, cooking, contemplation, poetry share, what it means …

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A Revelatory Elegy of Unknowing with Todd Davis (author of Coffin Honey)

Reading Todd Davis’s gorgeous poems, you can’t help but feel that the capacities of human vision, and also our appetite for exactly this way of seeing and naming have been mysteriously, precisely increased. – Jane Hirshfield The poems of Todd Davis sharpen a reader’s spirit and focus, on the bloodstained teeth breaking apart the day-to-day doldrums and on the mythic imagination necessary to bear witness to this daunting moment in our species, on our planet.  Todd Davis and I spoke back in 2019 about his book Native Species and he has read his poems in the last two years on …

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Gary Nabhan (aka Brother Coyote) on Wisdom Gleaned from Fishers & Farmers

“Gary Nabhan’s work reminds us of what I can describe only as a historical wonder…” – Wendell Berry Gary Nabhan (aka Brother Coyote) on Wisdom Gleaned from Fishers & Farmers Gary Nabhan (aka Brother Coyote) is an Ecumenical Franciscan Brother, a first generation Lebanese-American, seed saver, agro-ecologist, ethnobotanist, agrarian activist, and author. A former MacArthur Fellow, he has been called the “father of the local food movement” by Time. He currently holds the W.K. Kellogg Chair in Food & Water Security for the Borderlands. Gary has engaged with farmers and refugee farmworkers in Lebanon, Egypt, Palestine, and Oman. Nabhan keeps …

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