Author Archives: TTR

Erin Elizabeth Smith

Sesquicentennial Alice A hundred and fifty years, and it’s hard to believe I’m no longer a girl, aged into bluebonnet dresses and spooned-up hair-dos.  I have become a woman turned upside down in behind-the-scene featurettes, all Redbox demure, gazing with Victorian reticence into the CVS parking lot. How I got here, I never know, following

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Susan O’Dell Underwood

Susan O’Dell Underwood, co-founder of Sapling Grove Press, asks, “What if we aren’t practiced enough to recognize [the sublime] when we’re face-to-face with it?”

Susan O’Dell Underwood

Gnosis   I can’t give you everything I know, even if I wished nature held that kind of sway. Take for example the thousand heads I want to show you of grasshopper weeds, their tips like fragile, flaming fleece, bobbing one wave in the final pentecost of dusk. Go with me while I walk, each

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Susan O’Dell Underwood

God as Redbud   The spring pink fog of simple ghosts like hosts of harmonizing choruses, their low strummed alto sostenuto revives and revives and revives along the highway, this stepping forward sprightly lithesome line nothing like bright dogwood sopranos, but a whispered tonal wayward zone, a wily tribe, their every twig singing with tremulous,

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Susan O’Dell Underwood

Annunciation   You have to believe this gospel is man-made, the oil paint luminous as pain, the angel dressed in blood red. No woman would frame this sacred moment inside a gilded trap so garish and so public. No woman gestates willfully the glory of certain death. Here is sacrifice forced upon her, the rapturous

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