Reviewed by Dodici Azpadu
Poems Talking to Poems
Setting Your Poetry Manuscript Apart
edited by Jeffrey Levine and Kristina Marie Darling
Tupelo Press
January 2026, 112 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1961209367
Poems Talking to Poems is a book of fourteen essays edited by Jeffrey Levine and Kristina Marie Darling. Both Levine and Darling are prolific and prize-winning poets, essayists, and fiction writers. Together, they host regular Tupelo Press workshops for practicing poets. The workshops and this collection are embodied in the subtitle of book Setting Your Poetry Manuscript Apart.
Levine takes gems from his blogs and workshop material to create the frame for the book. “The Poetry Manuscript: Arts and Crafts” serves as an introduction to the granular exploration of what he calls “the art of transforming individual poems into a transcendent whole.” Every chapter Levine contributes requires poets to dive deeper into creative self-awareness. Only after doing so is the poet prepared for scrupulous attention to the nuts and bolts of possible ways to organize manuscripts.
Darling contributes essays that show how different poets use silence, shifts, repetition, secrets, and lyric imagination to enrich individual poems. Her reviews of other poets demonstrate how individual poems influence coherent, memorable manuscripts.
Other contributors are Cassandra Cleghorn, Kathy Fagan, Katie Farris, and Lisa Goett. They echo the methods described by Levine and Darling. This is critical to understanding the value of the collection. The intensity is what distinguishes these essays from online how-to sites and other blogs that offer manuscript organization 101. This book is serious about the process required from poets who believe they have enough poems to organize a book.
One of Darling’s essays, taken from a course she teaches, offers an introduction to hybrid forms of poetry and includes a helpful resources page. In “Building from the Ground UP: Writing the Hybrid-Form Manuscript”, Katie Farris echoes Darling’s introduction by underscoring the possibilities of working against reader expectations in traditional poetry. Obviously, iconoclastic, these forms still play with individual poems to create a manuscript.
Ilya Kaminsky’s essay “Putting the Book Together: A Little Bag of Suggestions” lays the groundwork for Levine’s elaboration later in the collection. Kathy Fagan’s essay “World Building Your Manuscript” describes her personal creative and book-building journey through her several publications, different for every one of her books. Fagan also stresses the immersive dynamic poets use to discover where organizing a manuscript will take them.
In “The Art of Stumbling Up,” Cassandra Cleghorn also stresses poet-self-knowledge. Lisa Goett in “What My Mother Taught Me: Practical and Impractical Advice for the Poet on the Making of a Poetry Manuscript,” suggests poets read their poems to themselves in relation to other poems in a would-be collection. Throughout, these essays are a clarion call to excellence. The advice is not to settle for your second best as a poet. Break yourself on the process of creating poems and books of them.
As an adjunct to the Tupelo Workshops, Poems Talking to Poems is invaluable. It gathers in one place the avalanche of material that Levine, founder, artistic director, and publisher of Tupelo Press and Darling, editor-in-chief of Tupelo Press manage in two-or-three-day workshops. That said, it would be a mistake to view this book as exclusively a workshop manual.
As a participant in Tupelo workshops, I can testify that Poems Talking To Poems works in the same way as the workshops. The message is overwhelming, inspiring, and transforming. The rest is up to the poet.
About the reviewer: Dodici Azpadu, MFA, PhD is a novelist, short story writer, and poet. Her fiction publications include: Saturday Night in the Prime of Life and Goat Song (Aunt Lute/Spinsters Ink) and subsequently Onlywoman (London, England). Living Room (2010) and Traces of a Woman (2014), both by Neuma Books, are available as ebooks. She’s currently at work on a novel, tentatively titled Living Lies.Her poetry publications include Wearing the Phantom Out (2013) and Rumi’s Falcon from Neuma Books. Individual poems have appeared in Malpais Review, Adobe Walls, ContraACultura (online), Parnassus, Sinister Wisdom, Latuca, The Rag, and The Burning Bush. Her work has also been anthologized in Centos: A Collage of Poems and Hey Pasean! Dodici teaches “The Joy of Poetry” and “Craft of Creating Writing” classes through University of New Mexico’s Osher Lifelong Learning.