Readers and writers: Two poetry collections, and a biography to start your ‘Gatsby’ celebration
Emilie Buchwald comes from the literary world. Mark Connor from the boxing ring. These two Minnesota poets from very different backgrounds debut their new collections this week. And we start celebrating the 100th anniversary in 2025 of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel "The Great Gatsby" with a look at a new book about one of St. Paul's favorite sons.
"Incandescent": by Emilie Buchwald (Nodin Press, $17)
I dissolve aspirin in clean water/cut back last week's flowers,/vibrant tenants of the purple vase,/offering them another day, or two or three.
And what might I cut back,/and what might I take in/to linger in sun and air? — "Everything Wants to Live" from "Incadescent"
Emilie Buchwald has returned to poetry, one of her first loves, with "Incandescent," taking readers from childhood to intimacy between mature couples. It is Buchwald's first published collection since "The Moment's Only Moment" in 2016.
Buchwald has been an editor, a teacher and an award-winning children's author and nonfiction author as well as a poet. She had an outstanding career as co-founder/publisher of Milkweed Editions literary publishing house. During her years at Minneapolis-based Milkweed she received some of the highest literary awards, including the Minnesota McKnight Distinguished Artist Award, the Minnesota Book Awards Kay Sexton Award and the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle. After retirement in 2003, Buchwald and her daughter Dana launched the Gryphon Press, dedicated to publishing picture books that help children understand the human-animal bond.
Minnesota poet Connie Wanek ("Rival Gardens: New and Selected Poems") calls Buchwald's collection "luminous" and writes that many of the poems are spare and beautifully crafted and "rich with soul-nourishing images and eternal themes." She picks out the poem Motivation as one that will stick with readers always, in which a bird is perched on a fake branch of a fake tree on a balcony but is still singing. Buchwald writes: "the perch may not matter/only the desire to sing." In "Making Bread" Buchwald condenses years of experience into seven short lines.
During her 24 years at Milkweed Editions, Buchwald published influential Minnesota nature poets such as Bill Holm, John Caddy and Paul Gruchow, so it's not surprising nature runs through her new collection, from rosebud trees to ravens.
Buchwald's collection "The Moment's Only Moment" won a Benjamin Franklin award from the Independent Book Publishers Association and her poems have been published in national journals. She taught poetry at the Loft Literary Center and edited three poetry anthologies. Her award-winning children's books are "Gildaen," "Floramel and Esteban" and, through Gryphon Press, "Buddy Unchained."
Nodin Press and the University of Minnesota Libraries Literary Archives are hosting Buchwald's launch of "Incandescent" with a free reading at 2 p.m. Saturday at Elmer L. Andersen Library, 222 21st Ave. S., Mpls.
"It's About Time (Millions of Copies Sold for Dad)": by Mark Connor (Connemara Patch Press, $14.99)
"He's the last badass Irish boxer in St. Paul."
That's the way poet Danny Klecko describes Mark Connor and Connor's debut book "It's About Time." Although this collection has poetry in it, Connor's insightful and personal essays about growing up Catholic in St. Paul offer a mini-history of the days when local Irish-Americans described themselves by the parish in which they worshipped. Connor writes that he is the product of a "mixed marriage" since his dad belonged to the Irish parish of St. Columba in St. Paul and his mom was from Holy Rosary "over the border, in South Minneapolis."
Connor is a poet pugilist who began boxing at 10. He is a former Upper Midwest Golden Gloves lightweight champion who has trained amateur, professional, competitive and recreational boxers since 2003 and works at the Element Gym in St. Paul. He's also written s about boxing and Minnesota boxers since the 1990s.
In this collection of poetry/essays Connor writes everything from tender tributes to lost loves and affectionate memories of his father. He had lots of jobs, including being a counselor at Ain Dah Yung, a facility for Native American youth that took him into friendships with people in the Native community, where he found a spirituality that matched his own.
Earlier this year Connor received the $1,000 Irish Network Minnesota Bloomsday Literary Award for this collection, from which he'll read at 8 p.m. Tuesday at The Dubliner Pub, 2162 W. University Ave., hosted by Klecko and the Bards of St. Paul with poet Erica Christ. Its free and open to the public.
"F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Composite Biography": edited by Niklas Salmose and David Rennie (University of Minnesota Press, $29.95)
If you are a devotee of F. Scott Fitzgerald's writing you will find new and interesting perspectives about him and his work in this collection of 23 essays by writers and scholars who look at this complicated man's career, his fraught marriage to Zelda, and his milieu in two-year chapters, giving a clear, linear picture of his life from birth in 1896 to his death in 1940. University of Minnesota Press calls this a new way of "grouping together" biographical materials and perspectives.
Minnesota Fitzgerald scholar Dave Page writes the chapter on 1908-1909, when Fitzgerald's parents moved back to St. Paul from Buffalo, N.Y., and Scott made lifelong friends who lived in and around Summit Avenue. Brian Mangum, English professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, writes about 1922-1923, the year after the Fitzgeralds left St. Paul with their baby, Scottie. Magnum reminds us that the Jazz Age of flappers and gin, which Fitzgerald invented, peaked in '22. He writes that this was the year of Fitzgerald's early success, but it didn't last, pointing out that in Fitzgerald's 1931 retrospective essay "Echoes of the Jazz Age," he noted that "though the Jazz Age continued, it became less and less an affair of youth."
In the chapter 1924-1925, French professor of American literature Marie-Agnes Gay explores what should have been a happy period in Fitzgerald's life because "The Great Gatsby' was published. But he was despondent living in the south of France where Zelda may or may not have had an affair with an aviator. Gay quotes a letter Fitzgerald sent to his editor, Max Perkins: "I write to you from the depths of one of my unholy depressions."
Scott Fitzgerald had fame and lost it, had money and spent it, had no money and cracked up. Loved St. Paul but left as an adult. And he wrote "The Great Gatsby," which will be celebrated in 2025. (See today's Literary Events calendar for one of the first local discussions of "Gatsby" by Anne Margaret Daniel.)
If you are following the "Gatsby" centennial celebrations, you will want this enlightening book about a man who never forgot his Minnesota roots.
