Nancy Holochwost

3 weeks ago | thesunmagazine.org | Nancy Holochwost |Stephen J. Knauth |Leath Tonino |Richard Chess

In Stephen Knauth’s “My Favorite Bird,” a “drab” little visitor to the author’s backyard prompts a thoughtful and empathetic contemplation of who this feathered creature is. The poem is a reminder that the world around us deserves our attention, an idea that is shared by the other poems in our April issue.

2 months ago | thesunmagazine.org | Nancy Holochwost

Reese Menefee’s work first appeared in The Sun in March 2023. That poem, “Ode to My Brother’s Face Tattoos,” is a description of painful family bonds that manages to be beautiful, visceral, and surprising all at once. When I read her latest poem, “Hymn”—equally powerful, but very different in style and subject—I began to wonder what makes this writer tick. I had the chance to ask Reese about the origins of her poems when we talked over Zoom just before the December holidays.

Aug 27, 2024 | thesunmagazine.org | Nancy Holochwost

Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum’s story “Clean Breaks,” which appears in our August issue, is her first publication in The Sun, but she is a veteran fiction writer: she’s the author of three collections of stories, most recently What We Do with the Wreckage, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. When Kirsten and I spoke by video call, she was in an eight-by-eight-foot room in her yard that her husband built for her when he was furloughed during the COVID-19 lockdown.

May 29, 2024 | thesunmagazine.org | Nancy Holochwost |Chrys Tobey |Jodie Hollander |Leath Tonino

Most of us turn to fiction or memoir for great storytelling, but sometimes poetry fits the bill just as well, as the poems in our May issue show. In “Dear Woman Who Tried to Pick Me Up at a Hollywood Club in 1998,” Chrys Tobey imagines the life she could have had if she’d said yes to a romantic overture. Jodie Hollander’s “In the Freezer” recalls a grisly childhood pet that still lurks in the speaker’s memory.

Mar 15, 2024 | thesunmagazine.org | Nancy Holochwost |Robert Cooke |Wendy Drexler

The vivid poems in our March issue describe escapes of two very different kinds. In Robert P. Cooke’s “Mountain Flowers” a young man slides into wistful fantasies as he drives his truck past clotheslines in the hills of Colorado. In Wendy Drexler’s poem, a vibrant retelling of a familiar story from the Bible, Noah’s wife flees not only the flood but the swarming, riotous ark that carried her away from it. Click the play button below to listen to the authors read these two transporting poems.