Tag: Barbara Crooker

ONE ART’s April 2026 Reading for National Poetry Month!

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ONE ART’s April 2026 Reading for National Poetry Month!

Date: Sunday, April 12
Time: 2pm Eastern
Featured Poets: Barbara Crooker, Molly Fisk, Donna Hilbert, Erin Murphy

Tickets are FREE!
(donations appreciated)

>> Register Here <<

About Our Featured Poets

Barbara Crooker is author of twelve chapbooks and ten full-length books of poetry, including  Some Glad Morning, Pitt Poetry Series, University of Pittsburgh Poetry Press, longlisted for the Julie Suk award from Jacar Press, The Book of Kells, which won the Best Poetry Book of 2019 Award from Poetry by the Sea, and Slow Wreckage (Grayson Books, 2024). Her other awards include: Grammy Spoken Word Finalist, the WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and three Pennsylvania Council fellowships in literature.  Her work appears in literary journals and anthologies, including The Bedford Introduction to Literature. barbaracrooker.com

Molly Fisk is the author of The More Difficult Beauty, Listening to Winter, and five volumes of radio commentary, and edited California Fire & Water, A Climate Crisis Anthology as an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Her historical novel-in-verse, Walking Wheel, will be out in April from Red Hen Press.

Donna Hilbert’s latest book is Enormous Blue Umbrella, Moon Tide Press, 2025. Work has appeared in journals and broadcasts including Eclectica, Gyroscope, Rattle, Sheila Na Gig, ONE ART, Cholla Needles, TSPoetry, VerseDaily, Vox Populi, The Writer’s Almanac, anthologies including Boomer Girls, The Widows’ Handbook, The Poetry of Presence I & II, The Path to Kindness, The Wonder of Small Things, Love Is For All Of Us, What the House Knows, Poetry Goes The Movies. She writes and leads workshops from her home base in Long Beach, California.

Erin Murphy is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including Human Resources and Fluent in Blue, winner of the 2025 American Book Fest Best Book Award in Poetry. Mother as Conjunction, a collection of lyric essays, is forthcoming in January 2026 from Harbor Editions. Her work has appeared in Ecotone, Women’s Studies Quarterly, The Best of Brevity, Best Microfiction 2024, and in anthologies from Random House, Bloomsbury, Bedford/St. Martin’s, and other presses. She serves as poetry editor of The Summerset Review and professor of English at Penn State Altoona. Visit her website.

ONE ART’s June 2025 Reading

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We’re pleased to announce ONE ART’s June 2025 Reading!

Featured Poets: Barbara Crooker, Robbi Nester, Judy Kronenfeld, Cathleen Cohen


>>> Tickets Available <<< (Free! Donations appreciated.)

The reading will be held on Sunday, June 8 at 2pm Eastern.

The official event is expected to run approximately 2-hours.

After the reading, please consider sticking around for Q&A with Featured Poets & Community Time (general conversation).


About Our Featured Poets:

Cathleen Cohen was the 2019 Poet Laureate of Montgomery County, PA. A poet, painter and teacher, she created the We the Poets program for children (www.theartwell.org.) Her poems appear in literary journals and in books: Camera Obscura (2017), Etching the Ghost (2021) and Sparks and Disperses (2021). Her artwork is on view at Cerulean Arts Gallery (www.ceruleanarts.com) and www.cathleencohenart.com. Cathleen blogs about ekphrasis (http://www.madpoetssociety.com/blog. Recently, one of her poems was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Judy Kronenfeld’s nine collections of poetry include If Only There Were Stations of the Air  (Sheila-Na-Gig, 2024), Groaning and Singing (FutureCycle, 2022), Bird Flying through the Banquet (FutureCycle, 2017), Shimmer (WordTech, 2012), and Oh Memory, You Unlocked Cabinet of Amazements! (Bamboo Dart, 2024). Apartness: A Memoir in Essays and Poems was published by the Inlandia Institute in February, 2025.

Robbi Nester is a retired college educator who has never stopped teaching in one way or another. She is the author of 5 collections of poetry, the most recent being About to Disappear, an ekphrastic collection that will be published by Shanti Arts. She has also edited 3 anthologies and curates and hosts two monthly poetry readings on Zoom, Verse-Virtual Monthly Reading and Words With You, part of The Poetry Salon Online. Learn more about her work at http://www.robbinester.net.

Barbara Crooker is author of twelve chapbooks and ten full-length books of poetry, including Some Glad Morning, Pitt Poetry Series, University of Pittsburgh Poetry Press, longlisted for the Julie Suk award from Jacar Press, The Book of Kells, which won the Best Poetry Book of 2019 Award from Poetry by the Sea, and Slow Wreckage (Grayson Books, 2024). Her other awards include: Grammy Spoken Word Finalist, the WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and three Pennsylvania Council fellowships in literature. Her work appears in literary journals and anthologies, including The Bedford Introduction to Literature.
www.barbaracrooker.com

>>> Tickets Available <<< (Free! Donations appreciated.)

Four Poems by Barbara Crooker

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THE COUPLE

Under a cloud of Covid restrictions,
ending up on the shores of hospice,
the couple set out in their canoe,

He was in the stern, steering as usual;
she was in the bow, looking for hazards.
The waves piled up; she began to bail,

while never letting go of his hand.
The journey lasted four nights; darkness
splashing over the gunwales. He grew

tired; she kept paddling. Eventually,
they started to drift with the current, which
took him out with the tide, then set him down

gently, on the farthest shore.

*

THE DREAM

          Mark Chagall, 1945, oil on canvas

The prone artist with a palette in the bottom of this painting
is conjuring up our wedding. A snapshot of us just floated up
on Facebook; it’s our anniversary. Were we ever really
that young? You in your powder blue leisure suit, me
in my Gunne Sax by Jessica McClintock prairie dress.
In this painting is what came later, le tour Eiffel, la Seine,
her arched bridges, us in la belle France. This is happiness
enclosed in the bubble of the full moon. Nobody thinks
about what comes next, how one day one of us will sleep
alone. But though I’m blue, sometimes you come to me
in dreams. And my heart is infused with the thousand petals
of the rose-colored dawn.

*

THREE YEARS LATER

I know you’re gone, but my body remembers,
especially at night when we curled into
each other, bears in a den, silverware
in a drawer. Plaid pajamas, worn flannel
sheets, we made our own sort of nest
in the winter dark. The moon, a ball of frost,
floated outside. Some nights, we heard
the ghostly notes of Great Horned Owls
as they courted, called to each other:
you you you. The way I hear you calling
my name, even though I know
you are not here.

*

PANTOUM IN WINTER

Gray day in January, and light snow is sifting,
shifting, fine white music, slanted lines.
No cars, delivery trucks, not even dog walkers.
Just this silence, and the hush of bird wings.

This shifting linear music, slanted white lines.
Notes from the leaden skies: tiny shooting stars.
There’s nothing but silence and the hush of wings.
How do we weather all these losses?

Messages from the sky: stray meteors burning white.
A stutter, a stammer, white delineating every twig and limb,
coating every tree. How do we weather these losses?
Snow geese pour out of the quarry, white shimmering

into white. A stutter, a stammer, covering branch and bark.
Gray day in January, and light snow is drifting,
snow so fine the line between visible and invisible blurs.
The difference, Nemerov says, between poetry and prose.

*

Barbara Crooker is author of twelve chapbooks and ten full-length books of poetry, including Some Glad Morning, Pitt Poetry Series, University of Pittsburgh Poetry Press, longlisted for the Julie Suk award from Jacar Press, The Book of Kells, which won the Best Poetry Book of 2019 Award from Poetry by the Sea, and Slow Wreckage (Grayson Books, 2024). Her other awards include: Grammy Spoken Word Finalist, the WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and three Pennsylvania Council fellowships in literature. Her work appears in literary journals and anthologies, including The Bedford Introduction to Literature.
www.barbaracrooker.com

ONE ART’s Top 25 Most-Read Poets of 2023

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~ ONE ART’s Top 25 Most-Read Poets of 2023 ~

1. Abby E. Murray
2. Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
3. Betsy Mars
4. Donna Hilbert
5. Linda Laderman
6. Alison Luterman
7. Julie Weiss
8. Robbi Nester
9. Roseanne Freed
10. Karen Paul Holmes
11. Heather Swan
12. Timothy Green
13. James Diaz
14. Jane Edna Mohler
15. John Amen
16. Barbara Crooker
17. Jim Daniels
18. Susan Vespoli
19. Sean Kelbley
20. Susan Zimmerman
21. Kip Knott
22. Jennifer Garfield
23. Margaret Dornaus
24. Paula J. Lambert
25. Gail Thomas

Four Poems by Barbara Crooker

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THE O IN WIDOW

is empty, a room with no windows.
The lifeless moon in a bleak sky.
The hollow in your throat I used to kiss.
A deep well, without a wish.
Without.
Where there used to be a couple,
the deep division of negative numbers.
The unused chair at the kitchen table.
The vast Sahara of one side of the bed.
The air in my hand as I reach out for yours.
The shape of my mouth when grief
sneaks up and takes me unaware.
The heartless dawn with you still gone.

*

AVOID THE IMPOSSIBLE QUESTION
It takes the form of ‘How are you?’ or “How are you doing?’
        Dr. Joyce Brothers

Pretend you have hearing loss.
Bend down and tie your double-knotted
shoes. Ignore the question; instead, ask one—
people love to talk about themselves.
Don’t even think about how you really are,
which is lost. Bereft. Adrift. A shell
tumbling in the tide. A crust of bread,
not the whole loaf. An empty glass,
the residue of wine. The real answer:
still here, though I wish I was gone.

*

CHRISTMAS WITHOUT YOU

I no longer make fruitcake—those garish
cherries, sticky chunks of glacéed pineapple,
candied peel—snug in their bed of dark spiced
cake. No one but you ever liked it. And I’m not
capable of walking in the ice-crusted woods
to chop down (really, saw) a fragrant tree,
wrestle it on top of the car, then lug it inside,
water it daily on hands and knees. Instead,
an artificial tree, pre-lit with tiny lights,
does its best to brighten these dark nights.
Where I sit in front of the fire, alone,
with my solitary glass of wine. The stocking
you sewed for me the first year we were
together hangs empty. As does yours,
felt cut-outs sewn by your mother when you
were two. There are no presents to wrap
or gifts to hide. The cookies are unbaked.
Roasts untrimmed. Just the silence of the snow,
the flame from a single candle. The longest
night of the year.

*

MAY YOUR MEMORIES BRING YOU COMFORT

Those were the words I’d often used when writing condolence
cards. But when I lost you, my beloved, I found I’d also lost
my memories. Not all of them, but the order of things:
when we met for dancing that night at the bar, was it before or after
the spaghetti dinner? What was the name of the restaurant in Lyon
that brought us a bowl of mousse au chocolat big enough to swim in,
and said, “Help yourself?” In which park in Paris did we find the horse
chestnut now resting in the shadow box? We used to joke, on our travels,
that together we made up a five-year-old. Who am I now, as I try
to traverse this difficult world without you?

*

Barbara Crooker is author of twelve chapbooks and nine full-length books of poetry. Some Glad Morning, Pitt Poetry Series, University of Pittsburgh Poetry Press, longlisted for the Julie Suk award from Jacar Press, is her latest. Her previous collection, The Book of Kells, won the Best Poetry Book of 2019 Award from Poetry by the Sea. Her other awards include: Grammy Spoken Word Finalist, the WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and three Pennsylvania Council fellowships in literature. Her work appears in literary journals and anthologies, including The Bedford Introduction to Literature.

Two poems by Barbara Crooker

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INERTIA

Night knocks
over its cup of black coffee,
but I’m too tired to wipe it up.
I’m sitting in a metal lawn
chair thinking it’s too much
work to lift my wine glass, drink
the last bit of Blanc de Blancs.
And it’s too dark to see
if there are any fruit flies in it,
gone to their happy reward.
Fireflies rise
from the tired lawn,
flash half-heartedly,
“Pick me, pick me.”

 

WATER MUSIC FROM THE LITTLE JORDAN:

Singing over rock, breaking over riprap,
strands that separate, then braid again.
Three blue jays land on the grass,
mirrors of a sky that’s in love with them.
They flap off, all discourse and discord,
like a squawk of politicians.  The water
keeps moving, seeking lower ground,
always in a hurry, muttering to itself.
Water says life is nothing but a brief
rush, a gush over obstacles,
and then, the sea.

 

Barbara Crooker is a poetry editor for Italian Americana and author of nine books; Some Glad Morning, Pitt Poetry Series, is the latest. Her awards include the Best Book of Poetry 2018 from Poetry by the Sea, the WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowships. Her work appears in a variety of anthologies, including The Bedford Introduction to Literature.