Nance Van Winckel
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RECENT BOOKSFROM THE MIDWEST BOOK REVIEW: Award-winning poet Nance Van Winckel presents NO STARLING, a brief yet evocative selection of poems utilizing a variety of rhythms and soundscapes. Subtly community-building in its reminders of human responsibilities for each other and the world at large, No Starling touches upon spiritual and political issues alike, singing aloud in a crystal clear voice that deserves to be heard. "Leastways": The ship had a bar, listing. A porthole / awash. Loyal drinkers swearing they'd seen / the giant squid. Sheer genius, they said, / to survive the millennia, the depths. // I blinked into that window at only / my face... all splash and dissolve. // Days under the white sails, over / cruel swells. Days taken / like aspirin. Hard little fact / of the body: if it goes down, / I go. And the bar raised. The bar / tilted. A tentacles here-on portends / a hereafter. I hang on. Rain clouds / pretend to take the lead.
BESIDE OURSELVES
Miami University Press, 2003 “Nance Van Winckel looks into the world’s shattered glass and animates the cultures, histories, human dispositions, and decontextualized landscapes found there. For those who celebrate Keats’s Negative Capability--haunting, reflective, discontinuous--lift this mirror and breathe upon it; from the silvery lake of mystery, light’s brief truth glints.” --Sandra Alcosser Curtain Creek Farm
Persea, 2000 “Portraying idealists who haven’t lost the faith, her stories are positive without being saccharine, wise without being ponderous, and her quietly humane vision effortlessly lifts up both the people she writes about and the people who read about them.” --Erin McGraw, author of Lies of the Saints Black Fields, Black Horses
The story is reprinted here. SEE BELOW AND TO THE LEFT FOR OLDER BOOKS |
BOOKS OF POEMS
NO STARLING
NO STARLING is Nance's newest collection. It's from The Pacific Northwest Poets Series, edited by Linda Bierds and published in 2007 by the University of Washington Press. SAMPLE POEM
"You People," a poem from NO STARLING
received the Friends of Literature Award from POETRY MAGAZINE. BESIDE OURSELVES
Miami University Press, 2003 “Nance Van Winckel looks into the world’s shattered glass and animates the cultures, histories, human dispositions, and decontextualized landscapes found there. For those who celebrate Keats’s Negative Capability--haunting, reflective, discontinuous--lift this mirror and breathe upon it; from the silvery lake of mystery, light’s brief truth glints.” --Sandra Alcosser BOOKS OF FICTION
Curtain Creek Farm
Linked stories, each told by a resident of a commune in Eastern Washington. SAMPLE SHORT STORY
Black Fields, Black Horses
Originally appeared in AGNI |
