Holds Upon Happiness

Albert Rios is an American poet, memoirist, and short story writer. He has “won acclaim as a writer who uses language in lyrical and unexpected ways in both his poems and short stories, which reflect his Chicano heritage and contain elements of magical realism.” In 2013 Rios served as Arizona’s first poet laureate. It was afternoon tea, with tea foods spread outLike in the books, except that it was coffee.She made a tin pot of cowboy coffee, from memory,That's what we used to call it, she said, cowboy coffee.The grounds she pinched up in her hands, not a spoon,And the fire on the stove she made from a match.I sat…

Sharon Bryan has published four volumes of poetry. Her most recent collection, Sharp Stars, won the Isabella Stewart Gardner Poetry Award in 2009. Bryan has worked as an editor and been a visiting professor at the University of Connecticut and Dartmouth College. I thought this was such a fun poem. Never better, mad as a hatter,right as rain, might and main,hanky panky, hot toddy,hoity-toity, cold shoulder,bowled over, rolling in clover,low blow, no soap, hopeagainst hope, pay the piper,liar liar pants on fire,high and dry, shoo-fly pie,fiddle-faddle, fit as a fiddle,sultan of swat, muskratramble, fat and sassy,flimflam, happy as a clam,cat's pajamas, bee's knees,peas in a pod, pleased as punch,pretty as…

Wallace Stevens was born in Reading PA in 1879. He attended Harvard University until a lack of money meant he had to leave. He then worked as a journalist, eventually attended law school, and ended up as the vice president of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company where he was employed for the rest of his life. After Stevens’ won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955 he was offered a position at Harvard. He declined because it would have meant leaving his position with The Hartford. (As a side point, I worked at The Hartford briefly when I first got out of high school.) Stevens’ poetry is sometimes described as difficult,…