Joyce Sutphen grew up on a farm in Minnesota. She served as Minnesota’s poet laureate from 2011-2021. Sutphen worked as a professor at Gustavus Adolphus College. Her poetry has won several awards and has been featured on Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion. My father's farm is an apple blossomer. He keeps his hills in dandelion carpet and weaves a lane of lilacs between the rose and the jack-in-the-pulpits. His sleek cows ripple in the pastures. The dog and purple iris keep watch at the garden's end. His farm is rolling thunder, a lightning bolt on the horizon. His crops suck rain from the sky and swallow the smoldering sun.…

Denise Levertov was British-born and came to the USA when she married. She wrote “deceptively matter-of-fact verse.” She and her husband were political and anti-war activists. Levertov taught at the University of Massachusetts, Tufts University, Brandeis, and Stanford University. She published more than thirty books. Almost too late to walk in the woods, but I did, anyway. And stepping aside for a moment from the shadowy path to enter darker shadow, a favorite circle of fir trees, received a gift from the dusk: a small owl, not affrighted, merely moving deliberately to a branch a few feet further from me, looked full at me—a long regard, steady, acknowledging, unbiased. Creature…

Louise Glück was an American poet and essayist. She died in October of last year. Glück’s writing was praised as having an “unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.” Her poems contain themes of nature, desire, and loss. This time of year, the window boxes smell of the hills, the thyme and rosemary that gew there, crammed into the narrow spaces between the rocks and, lower down where there was real dirt, competing with other things, blueberries and currants, the small shrubby trees the bees love— Whatever we ate smelled of the hills, even when there was almost nothing. Or maybe that's what nothing tastes like,…