More fine passages from this splendid collection: ...the sound of the first cicada now fitfully cutting the silence of dawn. Words wanted beyond what they are-- * Day returns us to a measured balance, to limits-- until the cicadas strike up: a deranged scream, a voracious incision over the moment. * Suddenly still, the tongue savours its slow monosyllable, its restrained flames. * The waves are now only inebriation, shouts that become quicklight. from 'Cicadas' Fibres of your

I've been enjoying Elsa Cross's work for some years now, thanks to Anamaría Crowe Serrano and Shearsman Books. Here are some favourite passages from this collection: Like a crab the heat draws its pincers closer. * The east wind is heard, the metal of goat bells, cicadas: the incipient polyphony of summer. from 'Stones' Movement-- the last vowel reverberates in the ear. * Ah! Metaphors, those liars. * The afternoon is getting drunk on its endless greenery, setting its oxygens

A continuing selection of my favourite passages from JL Williams' third collection: Dark, this desire for space. The wasteland stained star-white. A lake speared with dead trees whose white trunks stab the sky. The ribs of angels up. from 'Desiderata Nocturne' a raven stands in the jade grass still as a carving in onyx watching the blood drip out of the car soak into the soil dye the frond-like curls of ferns from 'Blood on the Trees' In order to smell the smoke in the dark r

I liked Williams' first collection, Condition of Fire, and published two selections of passages on my old Blogspot blog. Indeed, she launched her first book alongside my second, Divining for Starters, at Swedenborg Hall in London, as we were both bringing out books with Shearsman. I missed her second book (bought but I don't think read--I'll go scouring my shelves shortly) and picked up her third, After Economy, at the splendid Free Verse Poetry Book Fair this past September.

I'm happy to say that this impressive debut has been shortlisted for the Forward Prize for best first collection. Here are some favourite passages: This patch of sun-seasoned blue opens up to him.... from 'The Fisherman Measures Life' The broken drum of thunder beats beats the air in time, drowning the voice of water, bird, and beast. from 'Prosper's Storm' The machete is shadow & it bite the coconut just so. from 'Cutter Song' Black smokes traces the horizon with a finger wh

I'm surprised and delighted my chapbook, Scar, which came out a year ago this month, is still going strong, with a new review in Poetry London and excerpts included in Lauren Camp's radio show, 'Audio Saucepan,' on Santa Fe public radio station KSFR. As Lucy Mercer writes in PL, 'Scar is not, however, burdened with an overt reverence for nature at the expense of the everyday, it is, rather, an imaginative document of how global warming will feel, how are human experiences are

After years of attending AWP (the Associated Writing Programs' annual conference--Brits, imagine 11,000 writers in one U.S. city for three days) and thereby obtaining my American lit and food fix, I decided to take a break this year. It proved to be fortuitous, as I was suffering from a flu for the first time in years, and a bad one at that. It was only when I spoke to Lesley Wheeler that I began to feel sorry I'd missed it. She told me people were talking about hexes, spell

Helena Nelson has reviewed Scar for Sphinx here (and I'm ecstatic).... #HelenaNelson #Sphinx #chapbook #Scar #ShearsmanBooks

Katy Lewis Hood, a postgraduate student interested in women's contemporary poetry and the anthropocene (as I learned from her blog), reviews Scar for Sabotage Reviews and concludes: "Here, sonic echoes – from ‘slink’ to ‘shiver’ to ‘fish’, from ‘feline’ to ‘butterfly’ to ‘glide’ –create interconnections across the lines; even the seemingly desolate landscape of ‘stunted stalks, palest soil’ is shown to harbour a complex, living ecosystem of which the speaker is a part. As a r

In a round-up of six chapbooks in the latest PN Review, Alison Brackenbury gives Scar an absolutely superlative review, and I'm thrilled. I can't repost the entirety here on account of copyright, so here are my favourite passages: "Each observation has a whole page. This generosity, ideal for a pamphlet, is put to impressive use by Etter." "...unabashed lyricism...." "The passion of Scar is political." "Although strikingly well-informed, Etter makes fearless excursions into f

It seems that much of my life as a poet has involved waiting. First it's waiting for responses to submissions to magazines (and many US magazines routinely take six months now). Next, submissions of pamphlet/chapbook and book manuscripts. Following that, there's the wait for reviews.... When my latest chapbook, Scar, was published last June, I was especially nervous and eager about reviews because it was such a different work for me: a single long poem that used the space of

The excitement of 2016 for my writing largely consisted of the publication of two pamphlets: Hometown (V. Press), a collection of flash fictions; and Scar (Shearsman), a single long poem exploring the effects of climate change on Illinois. Each has received a couple of reviews, and I hope more are still forthcoming. I wish more places reviewed pamphlets, but so it goes! After having teaching relief that reduced my load in the 2015-16 academic year and completing much more wri

Here are some of my favourite passages from this impressive debut collection by Scottish poet Em Strang: The sunlight is squeezing her, squeezing the field-grass until her blue dress is a distant boat and the field is the sea.... from "Bird-Woman" ...more night on the fields than she's seen before, the mountains hovering like hawks. * It's dawn when I find her, grief-stiff, the rooks lifting and re-settling, lifting and re-settling, the sun beginning to burn. from "Wolf" ...g

Until last year, I rarely wrote a poem over a page long. Now, my current manuscript, The Weather in Normal, has four poems of 3+ pages, the longest being 'Scar', which also constitutes my chapbook of the same title from Shearsman Books. I've now read it for an audience twice: in Edinburgh in July, in my hometown of Normal, Illinois in September. Reading the entire piece in a single go raises a number of difficulties, most significantly the alternation of multiple voices/persp

Almost as long as potter Trevor Lillistone has been my partner, people have asked us whether we've collaborated. That answer was no until recently, when Ginger Fig Gallery in Taunton sent out a call for collaborations between art and text for their 'Book:d' exhibition. I went through my books and ongoing manuscript to find excerpts evocative of colours and scenes in nature that Trev could relate to various glazes. The greatest difficulty was how to get the text on the pot so