Umbrella: Issue 8, Fall 2008

The new issue of Umbrella is up today and I’m pleased to announce that I have a couple of sonnets therein, along with the always excellent Marilyn L. Taylor and Anne Higgins, who has a new chapbook forthcoming from Finishing Line, Pick It Up and Read. I had the pleasure of getting to know both Marilyn and Anne at West Chester in 2008, and getting to know their work. Both are delightful human beings and powerful poets.

The issue contains a clutch of other poets, some known to me by name only, whose work I am looking forward to exploring, pluse “Kindred Prose” by Rachel Dacus, Eric D. Lehman, and Arlene L. Mandell.

Editor Kate Bernadette Benedict describes the issue thus:

Here�s to Autumn and a new Umbrella issue, a miscellany. Even when there is no announced theme, sometimes a theme emerges anyway. As summer ends, here we have a number of poems that explore ripening, the coming of age, night thoughts, memories, an awareness of death�not a �hurrahing in harvest� in the manner of Hopkins but more of an equinoctial melancholy that looks ahead to the near and inevitable winter solstice. A little wryness and eros leaven the bread and the poems run the spectrum from the strictly formal to the prose line. Here�s to eclectism!

I hope you’ll take a look at my poems and then peruse the entire issue.