Reviews and Interviews
Up the Staircase Quarterly: Interview with Connie Post
Up the Staircase Quarterly: Following Floodwater (Glass Lyre Press 2014), Prime Meridian (Glass Lyre Press 2020) is your second full length poetry collection. This deeply communicative collection of poems confronts abuse and trauma, while also navigating survival. How did the poems come together in a format of a book? Was it a relatively quick writing experience, or did the book emerge over a long period of time? What did you personally take away from the experience of writing and then publishing these poems?
https://www.upthestaircase.org/connie-post-interview.html
Prime Meridian by Connie Post. Reviewed by Gail Goepfert
Prime meridian, like equator, makes me think divide, division. Two halves of a whole. In Connie Post’s second full-length collection, the body is divided from itself—in a complicated geography of breached boundaries. It is a narrative of self-preservation, of grieving the absence “of the life you were supposed to have.” Spinning us in and out of an often merciless reality, the narrator depicts the arduous learning of “the beauty of fractures—amnesia.” The necessity of disremembering. Ultimately, the book is a tutorial in “how to leave a body / and then return.”
https://rhinopoetry.org/reviews/prime-meridian-by-connie-post-reviewed-by-gail-goepfert
Split Rock Review Interview about her poem “Cooling Trend”
https://www.splitrockreview.org/news/connie-post
Poems come to me at inconvenient times. They arrive as a thought or just an image that occurs to me as I’m driving or merely sitting in the backyard. Something ordinary in my day, may become extraordinary to me. There are moments that congeal into something real and palatable. I used to write a few lines down, keep the paper on my desk, and believe that I could come back to the work at any time, and create the poem that presented itself in my conscious mind. I have made a new commitment in the past five plus years about my creative process and it seems to be working well. Unless there is a family emergency, I drop what I am doing and write the poem. The space that is open inside me, feels like a temporary portal that is open for a finite amount of time for that poem alone. I must walk with it, befriend it, let it tell me its secrets . . .
Connie Post “Advice on Submitting Poetry”
http://www.megwaiteclayton.com/connie-post/
Today’s Poetry Tuesday comes in the form of advice on how to establish a system for submission, compliments of award-winning poet Connie Post. Connie’s work has appeared in Calyx, Kalliope, California Quarterly, The Toronto Quarterly, and elsewhere. She served as Poet Laureate of Livermore, California from 2005 – June 2009, and her latest volume of poetry is Trip Wires. – Meg . . .
Lyric Essentials: Connie Post reads “Two Countries” by Naomi Shihab Nye
Sundress: Welcome to Lyric Essentials, where writers and poets share with us a passage or poem which is “essential” to their bookshelf and who they are as a writer. Today Connie Post Reads “Two Countries” by Naomi Shihab Nye.
Connie, I must tell you how excited I am to be discussing a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye. I’m currently working with poet Laurie Byro on a William Stafford Lyric Essentials, who I understand was her mentor. That fact, and a few of her poems I’ve familiar with, is about the extent of my knowledge on Nye. Can you tell us a little more about her? . . .
