Posts by: James Stotts

Baroque-Ass Poet: Adam Fitzgerald’s Debut

Sep, 2013 | by

“The fate of a writer is strange,” writes Borges. “He begins his career by being a baroque writer, pompously baroque, and after many years, he might attain if the stars…

Stolen Air, Broken Voice

Nov, 2012 | by

Osip Emilevich Mandelstam was born in Warsaw, a European Jew, in 1891. A subject of the Russian empire, his family was granted the right to move to St. Petersburg when…

In Pursuit of the Debutant

May, 2011 | by

What to make of Stephen Sturgeon after reading his first book of poetry, Trees of the Twentieth Century? Sturgeon, the debutant? Sturgeon, the first major poet of his generation? Sturgeon, producer…

Running on Fumes: Jim Harrison’s In Search of Small Gods

Mar, 2010 | by

A successful Orphic poetics often depends on the poet’s ability to arrest the reader’s critical faculties and to sustain that suspension across a traumatic arc. It is a high-romantic, if…