New Books In Poetry

I had the pleasure of interviewing poet, Terence Degnan while he sat on a bench in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. For those unfamiliar, we refer to Sunset not as a park, but as a still slowly-morphing section of the borough. It is not difficult to find an entry point into Degnan’s writing, just as interactions with him can feel effortless.He understands the nuances of communication on and off the page and manipulates them into something familiar and comfortable. He is also a poet of such dedication that he went back in time to acquire a Gary Snyder quote for an epigraph, such perseverance that he drafted 300 poems to get down to the 30 or so that grace this collection, and such conviction that he lives his life as he lives his art. With the ambient noise of cars and people and the wind threatening rain, we spoke about the beauty of his collection Still Something Rattles (Sock Monkey Press, 2016), about trees, about lineage and language; we allowed the stimuli of what was happening around us to enter our convers