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Adventures in Reading 2019
2019 was a challenging year—deaths, health scares, creative dysfunction—but as ever, reading sustained me. I finally read Juan Rulfo‘s classic Pedro Páramo—one of those books that makes me wonder why I waited so long. It’s a visceral, phantasmagorical novel with all the psychic force of Greek tragedy. I knew that it is widely considered the first fully-realized instance of magical realism, and I can see how unlikely it would be for us to have One Hundred Years of Solitude without Rulfo’s influence.Read More
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My Year in Books (2016)
As I did at the end of 2015, I’m laying out my past year’s book reading in the spirit of sharing the often haphazard journey of mind and heart that is my chief solitary pleasure. (There are other pleasures, of course, not solitary at all, but they don’t involve this particular addiction.) Again, the books listed below are ordered according to when I read them. I won’t comment on all of these titles because all of them are well worth reading.Read More
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50 Best Poetry Books Since 1950
Back in 2009, Tony Barnstone initiated a game on Eratosphere that involved readers posting their choices for “the Best 100 Poetry Books of the 20th Century.” It was a great exercise because it was more than a list: each reader could choose only one book and had to write a brief paragraph explaining why that book belonged on the list. Well, we’re almost a decade and a half into the 21st century, and the 20th “best books” lists have been done to death. So I’d like to adapt Barnstone’s game to our current situation.Read More
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Sylvia Plath (Part Six)
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Sylvia Plath (Part Five)
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Sylvia Plath (Part Four)
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Sylvia Plath (Part Three)
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Sylvia Plath (Part Two)
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Sylvia Plath (Part One)
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Ted Hughes’s “The Thought-Fox”
I remember a luminous floating breathlessness the first time I read this poem, in the dusty yellow light of the cage I worked in (a literal cage: one chainlink wall separated my gray metal desk and the cramped, brown-and-tan linoleumed room it sat in from a store-room where crippled book trucks awaited repair amid stacks of gray metal shelving and the hulks of gray metal file cabinets whose drawers were too battered to close). This was 1970.Read More
Joseph Hutchison, Colorado Poet Laureate 2014-2019, has published 20 collections of poems and edited or co-edited three poetry anthologies. He currently directs two master’s-level programs for University College at the University of Denver: Professional Creative Writing and Arts & Culture Management. Joe lives with his wife, Melody Madonna, in the mountains southwest of Denver, Colorado, the city where he was born. 
