Kevin O’Rourke – Michigan Quarterly Review

Kevin O’Rourke

Kevin O’Rourke lives in Philadelphia, where he works in publishing. His first book, the essay collection As If Seen at an Angle, was published by Tinderbox Editions; he is currently working on several follow-up books, including a memoir about surviving suicide. Work on this project has been supported by a grant from 4Culture. He is also a senior science/research writer and editor, and has covered everything from mitochondrial research, to global health financing, to COVID-19. His creative work has appeared in a number of journals, including Big Muddy Journal and Seneca Review, among others. A member of the NBCC, he is an active book and arts critic; his criticism has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Kenyon Review, and Michigan Quarterly Review.

The book cover for Timothy Donnelly's Chariot which features the word "Chariot" over a collage-like white background, laid over an abstract dark background with blue gradient in the upper right corner.

A Reconciliation with the External World: Timothy Donnelly’s Chariot

I used to think long poems—and books mainly consisting of long poems—were inherently more difficult than short poems and collections thereof. I thought that making one’s way through something truly long constituted a sort of badge of honor, if only a badge of perseverance. But now I’m less certain that long poems are necessarily more …

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Like a Divination: A conversation with Laynie Browne

Laynie Browne is one of those writers who makes those of us who publish relatively infrequently (ahem, selectively) green with envy. She is the author of fourteen books of poetry, three novels, and one collection of short fiction. In addition, she has several books forthcoming from more than one press (including, full disclosure, my book’s publisher, Tinderbox Editions). …

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The Laying of Hands: Tom Sleigh’s The King’s Touch

Tom Sleigh’s latest poetry collection, The King’s Touch, contains multitudes. It’s not a terribly long book—116 pages including section break pages, notes, and acknowledgements, in line with the average length of full-length poetry collections—but there is a lot between its covers.1  The work is split into four sections, the fourth of which only contains four poems; the collection starts with …

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Process and Product: CAConrad’s AMANDA PARADISE

It’s very possible that CAConrad is the most interesting poet currently working in the United States. Either that, or they’re our most bewildering. Perhaps both. AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration, CAConrad’s most recent book, has only reinforced my view of the poet. I’m not alone; in their review of CAConrad’s 2010 collection, The Book of Frank, Eileen Miles wrote that “for me, …

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Scriptio Continua: Lauren Levin’s Nightwork

As human inventions go, punctuation is a recent one: the English word “punctuation” only dates to the 1530s, and the first rudimentary Western system of punctuation—in which dots signifying pauses of different lengths were placed between words—was devised in the third century BC by the Greek scholar Aristophanes of Byzantium. Prior to that readers of …

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