New Release Alert!
The Inextinguishable, Poems by Michael Lavers
“The Inextinguishable is a book of the biggest, oldest, questions: Why are we here? What are we for? What is enough? To make the old resonate in a way that is bruising, clarifying, stunning—this is poetry’s greatest task. And Michael Lavers seems made for it, writing poems that capture life flung like a coin, spinning so quickly between grief and delight that the two are indistinguishable.
Here we are shown how moments of chaos, of oblivion, of soft vague time crystallize into ‘small bright true things’—eglantine, river-gleam, Verdi, yellow finches, a marriage, children. ‘It’s enough, and it is never enough, this life,’ we are told at one point, and what could be truer?
To use words like sweeping, sublime, and dazzling is to risk cliché. And yet. Anything true is worth saying. The Inextinguishable is simply magnificent. I have never read so many perfect poems so close together. I didn’t want the book to end, and luckily, a book like this never really does. This is poetry to have absolute faith in. This kind of poetry is what language is for.”
–Claire Wahmanholm
Michael Lavers is the author of After Earth, published by the University of Tampa Press. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, AGNI, Southwest Review, Best New Poets2015, TriQuarterly, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere. He has been awarded the University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize, the Moth Poetry Prize, and the Bridport Poetry Prize.
Together with his wife, the writer and artist Claire Åkebrand, andtheir two children, he lives in Provo, Utah, and teaches at Brigham Young University.
Tampa Review 65 is forthcoming in May 2023!
Tampa Review 65 is available for preorder now! The latest issue of Tampa Review features fiction by Samuel Raphael Barber, Blair Benjamin, and Anita Bhaduri; poetry by Jon Davis, Jessica de Koninck, and Katherine Gaffney; Nonfiction by Katherine Busatto, and much more!
Katherine Gaffney’s collection, Fool in a Blue House, is forthcoming in June 2023!
Katherine Gaffney was the 2022 winner of the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry. She holds an MFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is currently working on her PhD at the University of Southern Mississippi. Her work has previously appeared in jubilat, Harpur Palate, Mississippi Review, Meridian, and elsewhere. She has won the Mississippi Review Poetry Prize among others and has attended the Tin House Summer Writing Workshop, the SAFTA Residency, and the Sewanee Writers Conference as a scholar. Her first chapbook, Once Read as Ruin, was published by Finishing Line Press.
Fool in a Blue House crafts carefully appointed rooms, both interior and exterior, alongside familial and romantic love, loss and near loss of beloveds, selves, and even neighborhood rabbits. Dwelling in contradictions—strength and fragility, humor and heartbreak, safety and threat—this book ponders impossibilities as solutions to its own predicaments, “Perhaps it would be easier to write in a chorus.” But these poems know that this is not the cure. These impossibilities are simply “a whole herring” dropped down a throat, a momentary pause before we dare “to defy what the sky tells us” and instead begin to tell “ourselves that we can will the sky to give.”
Tampa Review judges praised Gaffney’s collection, stating:
“When Katherine Gaffney’s speaker refers midway through her collection to what is ‘Long precedented / in defense of choice’, she reminds us that only a few poets can truly predetermine the conditions for their own arrival. Yet, in choosing this extraordinary year-spanning Fool in a Blue House as the winner of the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry, we were struck by Gaffney’s intense working between curation and assurance, this against the poetic life and body in its ongoing amendments of scale. Gaffney, in ranging us from medieval deconstructions of the heart, through to the near-apocalyptic radicalisation of the domestic, produces a book so exceptionally alive, wild, tense, and learned as to announce Gaffney as a pre-formed, right-here, right-now major new voice in American poetry, her speaker ‘a denounced planet’ only so denounced because the shadow of its prefigurement is about to cast wide.
Fool in a Blue House is as much a collection of poems as it is a process of intimate discovery—intimacy in relation to love in all its facets and subsequent relationships. The poems wrestle with inheritances of gender and seek fissures for growth beyond that inheritance.”
Poet Katherine Gaffney says of her collection:
“Most of these poems unfurled during a time of intense evolution in my understandings of romantic and familial relationships. The poems seek to reconcile the tectonic shifts involved with those kinds of relationships as we, as humans, move through time and space.”
The Tampa Review Prize for Poetry is given annually for a previously unpublished booklength manuscript. Judging is by the editors of Tampa Review.
Available for preorder now!