The National Poetry Series was established in 1978 to recognize and promote excellence in contemporary poetry by ensuring the publication of five books of poetry annually through participating publishers. In addition, the National Poetry Series has partnered with Miami Book Fair to award the Paz Prize in Poetry, which ensures bilingual publication for a book of poems written in Spanish. This conversation features Amanda Moore on Requeening: Poems, in conversation with David St. John, The Last Troubadour: Selected and New Poems. Engaging the matriarchal structure of the beehive, Moore explores the various roles a woman plays in the family, the home, and the world at large. Beyond the productivity and excess, the sweetness and sting, Requeening brings together poems of motherhood and daughterhood, an evolving relationship of care and tending, responsibility and joy, dependence and deep love. With a special introduction by Daniel Halpern, founder of HarperCollins imprint Ecco and the National Poetry Series.
2020 National Poetry Series Winner Amanda Moore
2020 National Poetry Series Winner Amanda Moore
St. John, David
David St. John is the author of 11 collections of poetry – including Study for the World’s Body, nominated for the National Book Award in poetry – as well as Where the Angels Come Toward Us, a volume of essays, interviews, and reviews. In his new collection, The Last Troubadour: New and Selected Poems (Ecco), nothing is too small to escape his notice or too large to be explored, such as the beauty of the word “guitar,” the suicide of a friend, the illness of a lover, or the texture of longing and desire. A sharp observer of landscapes within and without, St. John directs his gaze to probe both the darkest and the most inspiring parts of being human, the small moments between friends and lovers, and the groundswells that alter lives.
Moore, Amanda
Amanda Moore’s poems have appeared in journals and anthologies including Best New Poets, ZYZZVA, Cream City Review, and Mamas and Papas: On the Sublime and Heartbreaking Art of Parenting. Her essays have been published in Baltimore Review, Hippocampus Magazine, and on the University of Arizona Poetry Center blog. Requeening: Poems (Ecco), is her debut collection of poetry. In it, she engages the matriarchal structure of the beehive, exploring the various roles a woman plays in the family, the home, and the world at large. Beyond the productivity and excess, the sweetness and sting, Requeening brings together poems of motherhood and daughterhood, an evolving relationship of care and tending, responsibility and joy, dependence and deep love. The poems that anchor this collection also contemplate the inevitability of a hive’s collapse and consider the succession of “requeening” a hive as “a new heart ready to be fed and broken and fed again.” The collapse is both physical – there are poems of illness and recovery – and emotional, as the mother-daughter relationship shifts.
Halpern, Daniel
Daniel Halpern is the author of eight collections of poetry, and has received numerous grants and awards (including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the 1993 PEN Publisher Citation). For twenty-five years he edited the literary magazine Antaeus. He is currently Editorial Director of The Ecco Press/HarperCollins.