What is Steven Cramer reading?

This weekend's featured contributor to Writers Read: Steven Cramer, author of four poetry collections.

Part of his entry:

I’ve been reading and rereading Jonathan Weinert's first book of poetry, In the Mode of Disappearance (Nightboat Books, 2008), one of the thornier and more rewarding first collections I've encountered in long awhile. It's hard to write about poetry—which is an event of language or it is nothing—without quoting. From "Suave": "If I could climb into death now/as into a foreign car, where/in all of France would you drive me?" Who wouldn't want to read on? Suave, indeed.

Weinert is a difficult poet influenced by difficult poets—Blake, Stevens—and he takes an angular, often oblique approach to his subjects. His imagery, diction, and syntax, though, are always acute....[read on]

Steven Cramer's four poetry collections are The Eye that Desires to Look Upward (1987), The World Book (1992), Dialogue for the Left and Right Hand (1997), and Goodbye to the Orchard (2004), which won the 2005 Sheila Motton Prize from the New England Poetry Club, and was named a 2005 Honor Book in Poetry by the Massachusetts Center for the Book.

Recipient of fellowships from the Massachusetts Artists Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, he currently directs the Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Lesley University in Cambridge.

Visit Steven Cramer's website and read many of his poems available online.

Writers Read: Steven Cramer.

--Marshal Zeringue