A ray of light shot a bright finger into Milton Kessler’s Binghamton University classroom. He paused, that day’s lesson plan falling away, and began to recite lines from Theodore Roethke’s “What Can I Tell My Bones?”
Zack Grabosky and Gerry Crinnin in Coversation: Video
Poets talk Grabosky’s Blazes, Binghamton, and more
Zack Grabosky, author of the poetry collection Blazes, connected over Zoom for a conversation with Gerry Crinnin, fellow poet and compatriot from their days in the SUNY Binghamton Creative Writing Program. Zack read several poems from Blazes and talked with Gerry about the genesis of the book, his travels through New York and Pennsylvania, fatherhood, and other poets they both studied under and befriended, like the great Milton Kessler.
Watch
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Buy your copy directly from Foundlings Press, from SPD, or from your local independent bookseller.
Rick Jackson Remembers Ralph Angel
Earlier this year we mourned the passing of the poet and beloved teacher Ralph Angel. Ralph contributed a chapbook of extraordinary poems to Strays Pack 2. This was, tragically, his final publication; he passed away unexpectedly on March 6, 2020.
Ralph was the Edith R. White Distinguished Professor at the University of Redlands and a member of the MFA in Writing faculty at Vermont College of Fine Arts. His fellow VCFA faculty member, the poet Richard Jackson, wrote a beautiful remembrance for Ralph in the latest issue of the VCFA magazine.
Rick writes about the “intimate distance” of Ralph’s poetry, captured so movingly in his Strays contribution. Rick cites an untitled poem from the collection. The poem “starts off with all the bustle of everyday life,” he writes:
… then moves to ashes, tears, “whispering aspens,” and ends: “an angel comes and taps / my lips.” An angel. How fitting. How consoling to think so. The invisible, the silence. The absent presence.
Following Ralph’s footsteps, Rick will be a featured poet in Strays Pack 3, which we’ll release this December 15.
We’re out of Ralph’s limited-edition chapbook, but there are still copies available through SPD.