Priscilla Long
Review of Nature: Poems Old and New, by May Swenson, Women’s Review of Books, Vol. 12, No. 4 (Jan. 1995).
May Swenson (1913-1989) was a visionary poet, a prodigious observer of the fragile natural world, a poet who brought our deepest questions to the center of her work. By the time she died at 76 she had published some 450 poems in ten books, including a few poems that rank among the finest composed in the late twentieth century. Nature: Poems Old and New contains 183 poems selected and ordered to emphasize her affinity to the out-of-doors. The poems are lush, delicious, witty, at times trite, at times deeply philosophical.
Swenson was an unrelentingly lyrical poet, a master of the poetic line in which near sounds accumulate and… Continue reading
University of New Mexico Press, 2015.
Samuel Green, Inaugural Poet Laureate of Washington state, says of Crossing Over:
“In bridge-engineering lingo,” the note to one of these poems tells us, “the ‘dead load’ is the weight of the bridge itself. The ‘live load’ is the weight of traffic crossing the bridge,” and this is a poet obsessed with bridges and crossings, as the title of the collection implies: chaos to order; grief to acceptance; solitude to connection; confusion to understanding; life to death; past to present; dark to light—themes as old as poetry. Quoting Wilder, she says, “the bridge is love.” Perhaps. But love as a noun is just the ‘dead load.’ It’s love supported by the imagination that becomes the ‘live load’ here, fully aware that the… Continue reading
Anne Carson’s seventh book, The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos is a poem about an erotic relationship that proceeds from adolescent fixation to post-divorce continuing fixation. Carson is a classical scholar as well as a poet, and her intense and synthesizing erudition, here brought to bear on the subject of desire, is partly what makes her such a thrilling read. She moves easily from Duchamp to Degas to Demeter, the mythical mother who, like the mother here, is dead set against her daughter’s disastrous fling with Hades. In… Continue reading
This review of Working the Garden: American Writers and the Industrialization of Agriculture by William Conlogue appeared in Technology and Culture Vo. 44, No. 2 (2003), 421-422.
During the past century, American food production has undergone a radical transformation as the family farm has given way to industrial agriculture – to farm as factory. Working in the Garden walks the reader through the transformation – and its technological, social, philosophical, and ecological effects — by comparing historical actualities with visions of industrial agriculture in novels such as Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath and Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres. William Conlogue argues that our national literature has both envisioned industrial agriculture and provided metaphorical hand grenades in battles and social upheavals accompanying its ascendancy.
Conlogue is no Luddite, but… Continue reading
This review of The Lives of the Saints by Suzanne Paola appeared in The Women’s Review of Books Vol. 20, No. 12 (September 2003), 11.
Suzanne Paola’s grim, visionary third book of poems speaks in multiple voices about morality, faith, nature, human nature, and science in the age of the Human Genome Project. The characters (these are mostly persona poems) range from the medieval anorexic St. Catherine of Siena to Patient No. 6, victim of the 1940s Human Radiation Experiment in which scientists at the University of Rochester injected uranium into human subjects to investigate the results. In The Lives of the Saints, sacrifice is what binds the medieval world of the old saints to the Atomic Age. Images flash strobe-like from religious to scientific, from “Jerome/turning restlessly on… Continue reading
By Priscilla Long
“I have never seen anything quite like Priscilla Long’s book…. It presents a true alternative for the advanced writer.” —Maya Sonenberg
Wallingford Press. Pub Date July 1, 2010; ISBN: 978-0-9842421-o-8; $18.95
The Writer’s Portable Mentor is available from the usual online venues and can also be obtained in a very timely manner from The Elliott Bay Book Co.’s fast and efficient mailorder service http://www.elliottbaybook.com/
“The Writer’s Portable Mentor should be required reading for any working writer.” —Scott Driscoll, award-winning Seattle journalist.
“I think The Writer’s Portable Mentor is the best writing instruction I have used,… Continue reading
By Priscilla Long
“An intense and accomplished social history.” —Christopher Hitchens, New York Newsday
Paragon Press, Hardcover, 1989; paperback, 1991, ISBN 1-55778-465-5.
Accolades and Reviews
“A captivating account of one of the most dramatic and influential periods in the industrial history of the U.S. Highly recommended.” —Choice
“The style is brisk and appealing…a wonderfully human story….One of those rare works that asks and answers important questions about who we are as creatures of our invention and as a nation, and how we got to this point.” —Barbara Kingsolver, Women’s Review of Books
“Reads almost like a novel at times.”—Pennsylvania Magazine
“Both scholarly and unusually well-written, the story moves along at a good pace while not compromising the standards of acute historical analysis.”—E. P. Thompson, author of The Making… Continue reading
By Priscilla Long
This review of I Can’t Remember by Cynthia Macdonald appeared in The Women’s Review of Books, Vol. 15, No. 7 (April 1998), p. 7.
The poems in Cynthia Macdonald’s disturbing, brilliant sixth book, I Can’t Remember, constitute acts of remembering. The poems remember what has been forgotten, repressed, put away. They remember – possibly they inflict – the traumas of childhood and of history, and they do so with concrete images and unsettling immediacy.
A father is lost, not because he has been “screwing around” as we might say, but because “Daddy had been slipping/ his slick, rubber-bound prick into too many others.” The Nazi genocide is depicted, not as the generalized Holocaust, but as one Jew who “smells barbecue/from next door: family burning.”… Continue reading
By Priscilla Long
This review of The Life of Poetry by Muriel Rukeyser appeared in The Women’s Review of Books, Vol 14, No. 5 (February 1997).
The life of poetry, which Muriel Rukeyser first published in 1949, is a profoundly important book, and not only because Rukeyser was, as Jane Cooper puts it in her fine introduction, “One of the great, necessary poets of our country and century.” These essays speak about what poetry requires of poet and reader alike: a fully engaged imagination, the deepest possible connection to feeling, a willingness to attend to meanings, to engage with symbol and myth. “A poem does invite, it does require,” Rukeyser writes. “What does it invite? A poem invites you to feel. More than that: it invites you to respond.… Continue reading
Priscilla Long
Poet, Writer, Teacher, Editor
E-mail: priscillalong2020@gmail.com
MFA, Creative Writing, University of Washington, 1990
Founding and Consulting Editor, www.historylink.org, the online encyclopedia
of Washington state history
SELECTED AWARDS
2012 Hedgebrook writer in residence
2009 Jack Straw Productions Writers’ Program fellow
2006 National Magazine Award (feature writing)
2003 The Richard Hugo House Founders’ Award (a teaching award)
2002 Seattle Arts Commission (creative nonfiction)
PUBLICATIONS
Books
The Writer’s Portable Mentor: A Guide to Art, Craft, and the Writing Life (Seattle: Wallingford Press, 2010).
Where the Sun Never Shines: A History of America’s Bloody Coal Industry (New York: Paragon House Publishers, 1989).
Weekly column, Science Frictions, appears every Wednesday (started September 11, 2011) on The American Scholar website. To see the columns… Continue reading