Langston Hughes
The musical quality of his poetry adds a spiritual depth to his words and images. His poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” is important to me as a poet and has an essential historical role to play in the American Canon.
Wallace Stevens
He changed my world view and my understanding of poetry and how to observe things from a multitude of perspectives. In “The Idea of Order at Key West,” he describes the ocean as “a body, wholly body, fluttering its empty sleeves.” This is imagery to the nth power.
Sylvia Plath
Her writing inspires with the risks she takes with language and with her daring narratives. In “Morning Song,” she describes her newborn’s cries as a “handful of notes; / the clear vowels rise like balloons,” as if she can see them, and if she can, the reader can as well. ”
Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl – Diane Suess
I learn so much from this book about language and form and noticing. In a number of self-portraits she pays tribute to artists as varied as Emily Dickinson and Freddie Mercury, sharing her intimate connections with their lives and work.
The 29th Year – Hala Alyan
This book erupts with emotional images that have been controlled by the poet’s use of language and still resonate. In “Oklahoma,” her 8-year-old ideas of Heaven are those with family, away from school and all it entails for a girl trying to fit into a culture unwilling to allow it.
Originally from Overland Park, Kansas, Anne Graue is a poet living in New York’s Lower Hudson Valley. She is the author of a chapbook, Fig Tree in Winter, and has poetry appearing in SWWIM Every Day, The Plath Poetry Project, Rivet Journal, Mom Egg Review, Into the Void and in numerous print anthologies. Her reviews have been published in Glass: A Journal of Poetry, The Rupture, Whale Road Review, and The Rumpus. She is on staff as a reviewer for Glass: A Journal of Poetry and as a poetry reader for The Westchester Review.