account_circle by Tristan Beach
A born and raised Washingtonian, Tristan Beach taught college English across China from 2014 to 2017. Before that, he was a long-time associate editor for The Conium Review. He has been involved with various journals and literary presses since 2010, including Copper Canyon Press, Coffee House Press, Pitkin Review and Clockhouse. His poems and proses appear in Shantih, rawboned, The Writer in the World and Pitkin Review. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College and received his BA in English from Saint Martin’s University. He currently teaches creative writing, composition, and ESL at Saint Martin’s and co-founded the Raven Writers group.

One on One

A Conversation with Pamela Dionne

Issue No. 283 ~ December, 2020

Poetry Editor Tristan Beach Zooms in for a conversation with Pamela Dionne, author of Paradox and Illusion (Finishing Line Press, 2020). Dionne and Beach talk about healing relationships through poetry, faith and vulnerability in publishing, and how to be anti-racist in fiction. Highlights of their …

Book Lovers

Essay

Rae Armantrout’s Radical Swerving

Issue No. 263 ~ April, 2019

In the anthology, American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language (the first volume of the series), editors Juliana Spahr and Claudia Rankine gather a selection of contemporary women poets whose poems, included within the volume, represent some of the most pressing and potent examples of the innovative and radical possibilities of the poetic lyric. One continually exercised possibility is the use of lyric as a means of questioning language and its relationship to meaning, as determined by the self or by a wider community.

Merwin and the River, 1927-2019

Issue No. 263 ~ April, 2019

W(illiam) S(tanley) Merwin died on March 15, 2019, in Haiku, Haiku-Pauwela, Hawai’i. He was blessed with a long and prolific life, publishing more than 60 books, as author and translator, and receiving numerous accolades, including two Pulitzer Prizes in poetry (1971, 2009) and two appointments as U.S. Poet Laureate (Special Joint-Consultant with Louise Glück and Rita Dove, 1999; Poet Laureate, 2010). His well-documented emergence into the poetry scene of the early 50s began with his first collection, A Mask for Janus (included in The First Four Books of Poems), which received the Yale Younger Poets Prize, in 1952. His career steadily came to a close, signaled by his final collection of original poems, Garden Time, published in 2016. He suffered from macular degeneration, robbing him of his sight. This physical loss compelled him to dictate the poems, collected in Garden Time, to his wife Paula Merwin—who preceded him in death, in 2017 (Imada).