Benediction
—after David Hammons’s High Falutin’ (1990)
I wish you could smell it,
summer in the cities
where all these men were once
boys. Bless the bakeries.
Fifteen Poetry Recommendations for National Disability Employment Awareness Month
“<i>Orion</i>’s poetry editor Camille Dungy and friends are back with another suite of poetry recommendations we’re excited to share for October, National Disability Employment Awareness Month.”
Eleven Poetry Anthologies Handpicked for Orion Readers
“EACH MONTH, Orion’s poetry editor, Camille Dungy, and friends recommend poetry collections they think our readers might enjoy. This month we’re recommending a host of anthologies, and with them an opportunity to meet a diverse range of new and familiar poetic voices.”
Read more here!
Eleven Poetry Recommendations for Latinx and Hispanic Heritage Month
“EACH MONTH, Orion’s poetry editor, Camille Dungy, and friends recommend environmentally engaged poetry collections they think our readers might enjoy. This month we’re honoring Latinx and Hispanic Heritage Month with a fresh list of excellent recent collections from new and familiar poets. Take note and add some to your reading list!”
Read more here!
Camille has received the Academy of American Poets Fellowship!
“Established in 1936 and given in memory of James Ingram Merrill, with generous support from the T. S. Eliot Foundation, this prize recognizes distinguished poetic achievement and carries with it a stipend of $25,000 and a residency at the Eliot summer home in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Fellows are nominated and elected by a majority vote of the Academy’s Board of Chancellors. Past recipients include Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Frost, and Tracy K. Smith.”
Read more here.
Trophic Cascade reviewed in Poetry Daily
“Camille T. Dungy is both an outstanding writer of the “natural world” and one of the most deft makers of metaphor working today. Her metaphors refuse to let the reader rest in their connections, but instead create a kind of friction in the mapping of vehicle onto tenor, an incongruity that invites the reader to follow the various threads of implication in an unlikely pairing. Perhaps the connection between those two strengths—unsettling, dynamic metaphors and precise observation of the natural world—is no accident.”
100 Poems to Save the Earth reviewed by Nation CYMRU
“And in one of the most restorative and uplifting poems, Camille T. Dungy’s ‘Trophic Cascade’ there is a bountiful account of re-wilding and what happened in Yellowstone when they reintroduced the grey wolf. This led to trees growing up ‘beyond the deer stunt/of the midcentury’ and with that the return of underbrush which ‘warrened snowshoe hare’ and soon the place, and thus the poem is full of songbirds, muskrats and American dippers while abundant berries bring in the bears.”
Check out Camille’s summer book recommendations on Orion!
Find the lists here
Camille to judge 2021 Splash Contest
Learn more information here
Camille’s poem “In her mostly white town, an hour from Rocky Mountain National Park, a black poet considers centuries of protests against racialized violence” is featured on Poem-a-Day
Two miles into
the sky, the snow
builds a mountain
unto itself.
Some drifts can be
thirty feet high.
Picture a house.
Then bury it.
[…]
Read the full poem here.