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Remembering Tomaž Šalamun

TIR Staff

We were saddened to learn of the recent passing of legendary Slovenian poet Tomaž Šalamun, who was both an Iowa Review contributor and a visiting writer at the University of Iowa's International Writing Program. Christopher Merrill, director of the IWP and one of Šalamun's translators, said in 2001, "Šalamun has exerted a great deal of influence on many younger poets, including me. He's a world-class poet. He's easily the best poet of the Balkans, and one of the best of them all." (Read Merrill's recent tribute to Šalamun on the Huffington Post.) For more on Tomaž Šalamun, please visit the Poetry Foundation.

June Melby's MY FAMILY AND OTHER HAZARDS

Michael S. Lewis-Beck

Midwest humorists can be pretty funny—sometimes very funny, like June Melby. Melby, an Iowa native who for years worked the stand-up comedy circuit in L.A., returns to her childhood serving up sno-cones and wisecracks in her debut memoir about growing up on a mini-golf course, My Family and Other Hazards (Henry Holt and Company, 2014).

Django Decapitated: On Shane McCrae’s BLOOD

Micah Bateman

Shane McCrae’s second full-length collection of poems, Blood (Noemi Press, 2013), adapts the sliding and stuttering syntax of his first collection, Mule, to narrate and lyricize gruesome slave narratives from America’s past. Actually McCrae gives voices to the wounds themselves from such narratives, assembling an otherworldly chorus of haunting grotesqueries. Whereas nineteenth-century abolitionist novels waged their battles largely on the grounds of sentiment, McCrae’s collection switches the arena to horror staged with graphic realism. Rather than demythologize the America we all know was founded on its original sin, McCrae repaints America’s creation myth. Like Athena springing from Zeus’s cleaved head, what if America was born from a bath of blood? This collection depicts its new genesis.

Dispatches from Iowa City's Rescue Press Reading

Hope Callahan

Last Thursday I had the pleasure of attending a packed reading at Prairie Lights which featured two recent books of poetry published by Rescue Press. Co-editor Danny Khalatschi introduced both poets, beginning with Bridgette Bates. Bates earned her MFA at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and now lives in L.A., where she is the writer-in-residence at the Library Foundation of Los Angeles and frequently contributes to Kirkus Reviews.

"Winter in North Liberty" by Mark Strand

TIR staff

Mark Strand (1934–2014), acclaimed poet, essayist, editor, and translator, taught at the University of Iowa from 1962 to 1965. We offer his poem "Winter in North Liberty"—a town just north of Iowa City—in memoriam. The poem is from his recent book, Collected Poems by Mark Strand (Knopf, 2014).

Winter in North Liberty

Snow falls, filling
The moonlit fields.
All night we hear
The wind on the drifts
And think of escaping
This room, this house
The reaches of ourselves
That winter dulls.

Pale ferns and flowers
Form on the windows
Like grave reminders
Of a summer spent.
The walls close in.
We lie apart all night,
Thinking of where we are.
We have no place to go.

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