what I'm reading – Denton Loving

Official Publication Day for Feller

August 5, 2025 Denton Loving6 Comments

Hello Friends,

Today, August 5^th, is the official publication day for Feller, my new book of poems from Mercer University Press that explores themes of connection, longing, and the pursuit of a fully lived life. I’ve been writing these poems for about 12 years, so I’m really excited to finally be able to send this book out into the world, and to share it with you.

There’s a short window of time surrounding a book’s release where every action is amplified. If you’re inclined to help me help Feller reach more readers, here are a few things you can do.

1) Please buy the book. You can order Feller directly from Mercer University Press or from online retailers like Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Bookshop.org. Tertulia is offering a 25% discount if you order through their site by August 7^th. You don’t even have to create an account. Just enter the code FELLER at checkout.

Feller is also available at great independent bookstores, such as City Lights, Parnassus Books, Novel Memphis, and others. If your local bookstore doesn’t already have copies of Feller in stock, please ask them to order it.

2) Please rate and review Feller or add it to your “Want to Read” shelf on Goodreads or any similar platforms such as StoryGraph, BookWyrm, or LibraryThing.

Remember that you don’t have to purchase a book from Amazon in order to rate and review it there. There are legitimate reasons not to support Amazon, but reviews there do make a difference. Reviews don’t need to be lengthy. Any short, simple message to recommend the book is appreciated.

3) Post about the book on social media and tag me. Photos of the book (with your pet or your baby, on a beach or a park bench, etc.) are especially great to share! You can find me on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.

4) Come to events and invite me to read. I’ll be traveling a lot this fall. Check out my calendar of events to see if I’ll be near you. More dates are in the works and will be added soon. But I’m also still looking for opportunities to connect with more readers. If you host a book club or reading series, I’d love the opportunity to come talk about Feller. Let’s talk about getting something scheduled.

5) Teach it: If you’re a teacher and would like to teach from Feller, let me know. I’d love to connect with you and your students by visiting your classroom either in person or virtually.

In the days leading to publication, Feller has ranked as high as #9 on Amazon’s new releases chart for poetry, which feels remarkable! And look at these excepts from longer blurbs from three writers I deeply admire.

“Loving makes lyric sense of complex issues in poem after poem in Feller, with his special blend of eco-poetics and earthly reason.” — Elaine Sexton, Site Specific “At once timely and timeless, Feller is a superbly striking and essential book.” — Matt W. Miller, Tender the River “Reading Feller is a transformative, joyful, loneliness-alleviating experience.” — Annie Woodford, Where You Come From Is Gone

I feel incredibly blessed for Feller to receive some early attention, beginning with the exclusive cover reveal in Electric Literature! I gave my first official reading from Feller at the 48^th Annual Appalachian Writers Workshop in Hindman, Kentucky. I spoke to Greg Lehman on his Moonbeams podcast. I answered some questions about poetry and shared a poem on Deborah Zenha-Adams’ wonderful blog. I spoke to Emily Mohn-Slate for one of her great Beginner’s Mind interviews. A poem from Feller was recently featured at Verse Daily. Two poems from the book were published this week at Salvation South.

And my friend Davin Malasarn—who is a one of the most artistic and imaginative people I know—created one of his famous book-and-donut pairings to celebrate the launch.

One of the most exciting things about publishing a book is to see it interpreted and reflected through the eyes of readers. The other exciting thing is to connect with all of you. I can’t wait. Thanks for all you’ve done and what you still might do!

If you’re not already receiving these posts directly to your inbox, please subscribe. And in case you missed it… check out my recent conversation with Zackary Vernon about his YA novel, Our Bodies Electric.

Lauren Davis’s The Missing Ones

April 10, 2021 Denton LovingLeave a comment

Lauren Davis’s The Missing Ones is a slim but engrossing collection that reimagines disappearance of Russell and Blanch Warren. In 1929, the couple were driving home to reunite with their two young sons and to celebrate the 4^th of July. Their route took them on Route 101 along Lake Crescent where they presumably drowned. What makes these poems work so well is that Davis doesn’t waste time recreating the ways the Warrens may have ended up driving into the lake. Instead, these poems give voice to the dead as in the very short poem that introduces the collection:

Blanch Says

There are dangers
in deep waters no one

speaks of. Like dark
that climbs the spine.

There’s a stain on the rock
Unfolding. I drink the lake,

all of it. I make it mine.

Many of the poems are in Blanch’s voice. In some, she gives advice, such as in “I’ll Tell You What Happened,” where she says: “Your husband has something to tell you— / you can sense it in the cold. Wait until you are both done / drowning. The build a new home.”

The idea of the lake as a home is one of my favorite aspects of these poems. A grave is a home of a kind, but the lake is a living ecosystem. Some poems reference the lake’s “population” which sometimes mean the fish in the water, or the birds outside, and sometimes it refers to others who have perished in the lake’s waters. In some poems, the idea of the lake as a home is expressed through its “rooms,” all of which suggests that the Warrens are still there, unable to die or be truly forgotten because they were never found. The idea is haunting in numerous ways, especially when the reader is reminded of the couple’s two young sons. This is expressed in Blanch’s voice again in the poem, “Have You Seen,” where she says,

My love haunts good as
any ghost. It is more
than lake deep. Boys—

I am never so buried,
gloated, hemorrhaged with blue
That I forget you.

My only criticism of this lovely book is that it’s too short. I wanted it to go on and on. I guess I could say that I, too, am now haunted by this story.

Britton Shurley’s Spinning the Vast Fantastic

April 4, 2021 Denton Loving2 Comments

Britton Shurley’s new collection, Spinning the Vast Fantastic, is a beautiful guide for spiritual sustainment in a complicated and down-heartening world. The first poem in the collection, “When I Think I’m Through with Beauty,” refers to the world as one that “gnaws us to gristle, if we / don’t work free from its teeth.”

Many of Shurley’s other poems make similar references. Shurley is not speaking specifically the restrictions and hardships suffered under a pandemic. He’s talking mostly about how hard life can be in general, and yet, these poems feel especially appropriate for our time. This isn’t because of the way Shurley sees how life can beat us down. It’s more so because of the ways Shurley finds solace. In so many of the poems, that solace is found by taking a breath and paying attention to our surroundings.

In “When I Think I’m Through with Beauty,” the beauty that surprises and pleases is a “boy who’s built / like a thick brick shit-house / spinning a whip of forsythia // just bursting with bright / yellow blossoms, while his // boom box floods the street / with velvet organ chords / of old-time Baptist gospel.” As evidenced in this passage, one of the other ways Shurley finds delight and gives delight to the reader is through sound. The language here and in every poem in the collection is stunning, filled with assonance and internal rhyme, all of which help bring alive these amazing images like this boy with his forsythia.

A recurring theme in these poems is the joy that children bring, as well as the promise for their ability to better the future, as seen in “The Red-Winged Blackbird.”

THE RED-WINGED BLACKBIRD

Its name is a strut for the tongue.
A song that can crack the heart
like mine did when that bird lit down

on a purpled redbud’s branch
in Ron and Kelli’s field. This handful

of acres saved from an inland flood
of McMansions drowning half of Indiana.
This field where chickens roam—

Orpingtons, Wynadottes, and Rhode
Island Reds—all hunting for bugs at dusk

by a garden of onions and melons.
And as if that’s not enough, a child’s
on his way in fall. Now I know

I know nothing for certain, but this boy
will be born amidst magic, in a home

where cabbage, apple, and ginger
turn to jars of kraut so crisp
my mouth wants to shout and dance.

I hope his name holds such a tune,
that it sings like the sound of the red-

winged blackbird and can bare
a hyphen’s weight. Maybe Banjo-
Nectarine or Cannonball-Daffodil Abdon.

Either way, his life will be music;
he’ll make this cold world swoon.

One of the immense strengths of these poems is in Shurley’s ability to juxtapose the bucolic and familial against the material and trivial. With similar hope and promise, he references his own daughters, notably in “To the Harvey Weinsteins et al.” Shurley begins the poem, “Know my daughters believe in their power.” He then describes the girls performing a “spell” to bring snow and a snow day from school. “And damn, if it didn’t work,” he writes, “so that we could wake in a world / slowed and stilled for a day.” Shurley brings the end of the poem back to Weinstein—not only Weinstein but all the men he represents—warning such abusers to be careful, and to see what powers these young women have.

Spinning the Vast Fantastic is overwhelmingly an optimistic view of life. We see this in the view of young women like his daughters but also in the hope for young men like the aforementioned Banjo-Nectarine. But Shurley’s optimism is seen also by the wonders found in the world. One example is in the poem “Headless Wonder” that examines a 1945 report of a chicken who lived for 18 months without its head. Another example in the book’s title poem re-imagines an 1876 report of fresh meat falling from the sky. In “Parthenogenesis” Shurley writes, “If the ankle of the horse is holy, then so is the cow’s / cracked hoof, the sheep’s bleating tongue…” What I take away from these poems is that the world is always miraculous, even during dangerous and frightening times.

Buy Spinning the Vast Fantastic from Bull City Press.

Jennifer Stewart Miller’s Thief

March 6, 2021March 6, 2021 Denton Loving1 Comment

Jennifer Stewart Miller’s new collection, Thief, (Grayson Press 2021) begins with the poem, “My Dead,” wherein she says, “Maybe your dead / are kinder. But mine— / they won’t look you / in the eye. Won’t / say sorry or / bare their hearts.” Such are the privileges of death, one might argue. But not Miller. Instead, Thief is a collection of poems that gives voice to the deceased. They seldom say they’re sorry, but their hearts are revealed all the same.

Miller’s poems have a history of this sort of exploration. Her chapbook, The Strangers Burial Ground, recreates the lives of historical people found in New England cemeteries. But Thief hits far closer to home. These poems are more personal. In Thief, Miller explores many different forms of her own personal grief. There is the grief that follows the deaths of her father and her stepfather. But there is also the grief of a sister lost to addiction and ongoing mental health crises. In these poems are also incredible depictions of the ways that the living manage (or are forced) to endure, often because of everyday necessity. This is perhaps best explored in her poem, “The End,” where Miller writes:

I keep coming back to how my mother
left my stepfather

at Rutland Regional Medical Center
to hurry off to the bank in Granville—

thinking she could still add her name
to some account or other by

bringing in a few shaky words he’d
scribbled on a scrap of paper.

And that was that.
After all the grand passion—

just an old married couple
trying to sort things out.

One of Miller’s many strengths is the slantwise framework of her poetry as seen in “Poems I Probably Won’t Write About My Stepfather” that hints some parts of the past are better left unexplored no matter how much they haunt us. In “This poem has a highway in it” the poem takes on geographical qualities that reveal history, and yet, like the aforementioned highway, the poem and the narrative inside it move ever forward. It’s impossible to read this poem without feeling such forward momentum that you feel part of the narrative.

Another of Miller’s strengths is her knowledge of the natural world and a gift for mixing biological details with current events and elements of her own life, as in this poem:

To the Dead Striped Bass Swimming in Sunset

Swim on, beached beauty, agog
in the chilly marsh, aglow without
scales or skin. May the jut
of your jaw, your eyeless eyes,
guide you back to the sea. May
your body—filleted of flesh—
follow so lightly. Long, supple,
golden spine. Ribs vaulted with
air and light. Moony-white tail.
Even the waves lap you a prayer—
undulate, undulate. Striped bass—
gather up my newly dead, school
with them, show them the way
out of the still-dead April grass.

And the title poem, “Thief” celebrates the masked banditry of a raccoon even though its life is fleeting. “Tonight, I’ll raise a glass to what moon there is,” Miller says in this poem, “and lick up every last tongue-full of grief.” And really, this entire collection is like a celebration of that sweet taste that comes alongside grief. How would we go on without it?

Emily Mohn-Slate’s The Falls

November 8, 2020November 8, 2020 Denton LovingLeave a comment

The Falls

Emily Mohn-Slate is one of the greatest emerging poets I know, and THE FALLS is a beautiful, often breathtaking, portrait of a woman’s life in our times. These poems range from a painful first marriage and its lingering scars to finding new love and becoming a mother.

Mohn-Slate’s motherhood poems are some of the most revealing of her work and perspective. In “I’m Trying to Write a Joyful Poem” she asks, “why does joy always slide / into darkness?” All along, she juxtaposes the joy of tickling her son with “the collapse of long / love, how even the brightest / glint in the eye / becomes shadow eventually.”

Possibly a better example is in the poem “Girl on the Street” where she overlays her daughter just learning to walk with overly-sexualized, objectifying comments from men. In the mix are a series of poems written to the obscure poet, Charlotte Mew. In these poems, Mohn-Slate resurrects Mew and her work for a new generation of readers while simultaneously using Mew’s life to make revelations about our current time.

The title poem for the collection originally appeared in the April / May 2016 issue of Rogue Agent Journal (http://www.rogueagentjournal.com/issue13-14), but I’m pasting the entire poem here:

The Falls

White noise like galloping
horses, water twisting over

rock edge, a green-grey pour.
Long-fingered voices

lure me down. Heavy creatures,
we were not made to rise.

The mist packs a shape
like a hand reaching.

I want to be inside it.

A woman on her honeymoon
climbed down to the falls alone.

She picked her way over
slippery rocks, and disappeared.

Barely alive in her hospital bed,
she told reporters, I wanted

to touch beauty. It was like
a tornado pulled me in.

Mohn-Slate is such accomplished poet. Some of her newer work deals with the ways our lives merge with technology. One such poem, “People at Yellow Lights Scrolling,” appears online at AGNI. Please go and read it!

You can find links to more of her work on her author page: https://emilymohnslate.com/poems/.

THE FALLS is engaging and accessible while also working at the highest levels of craft. You will read these poems and only wish there were more. Please buy a copy of this book and see for yourself. A great place to purchase is from White Whale Books, Mohn-Slate’s home book store in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. They are also hosting a virtual reading on November 20, 2020, featuring Mohn-Slate, and it would be awesome to see you there.