Adam Tavel

Adam Tavel is the author of five books of poetry, including two new collections: Green Regalia (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2022) and Sum Ledger (Measure Press, 2022). His third book, Catafalque, won the Richard Wilbur Award (University of Evansville Press, 2018). His recent poems appear in North American Review, Ploughshares, The Georgia Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Ninth Letter, The Massachusetts Review, Copper Nickel, and Western Humanities Review, among others. You can find him online at http://adamtavel.com/

  • Three Poems

    Resingeing his right palm each take,
  • A Convalescent Bed in a Field of Yellow Tulips

    Your wires trail into a gopher hole.
  • Cameron Barnett & Maggie Smith: Two Reviews in Brief

    Serving as reviews editor for Plume for the past two years has been a singular honor in my writing life.…

    Issue #77 December 2017
  • Tim Seibles: One Turn Around the Sun

    Halfway through his epic eleven-page sequence “Mosaic,” Tim Seibles echoes the closing of Robert Hayden’s oft-anthologized “Those Winter Sundays,” writing,…

    Issue #76 November 2017
  • Thanksgiving Chorus

    Kindergarteners beautiful and dumb
  • Nancy Chen Long: Light Into Bodies

    In “Lapidary,” arguably her most commanding poem, Nancy Chen Long constructs a lush and brooding narrative about a rock collector…

    Issue #75 October 2017
  • William Brewer: I Know Your Mind

    According to a recent New York Times article, drug overdoses are now the leading cause of death for Americans under…

    Issue #74 September 2017
  • Mark Cox: Sorrow Bread: Poems 1984-2915 & Bill Knott: I am Flying Into Myself

    n the final stanza of “Joyland,” a poem teeming with amusement park ephemera, Mark Cox’s playful account of a mini-golf…

    Issue #73 August 2017
  • Patricia Smith: Incendiary Art

    It seems fitting, if lamentable, that the poetry community must celebrate Gwendolyn Brooks’s centenary during the ever-mounting tensions of Trumpism,…

    Issue #72 July 2017
  • Robert Gibb: After

    In “The Deer Lay Down Their Bones,” one of his last great poems, the oft-neglected master Robinson Jeffers shows an…

    Issue #71 June 2017
  • In Brief: Tommye Blount, Jennifer Ghivan, Saarah Pape, Shelly Wong

    With the sensuality of Carl Philips and the edginess of Wanda Coleman, Tommye Blount’s debut chapbook What Are We Not…

    Issue #70 May 2017
  • Janice N. Harrington: Primitive: The Art and Life of Horace H. Pippen

    Two epigraphs from the esteemed Cornel West introduce the seventh section of Primitive: The Art and Life of Horace H.…

    Issue #69 April 2017
  • Review: Frannie Lindsay

    In his exquisite, jazzy homage to Frederick Douglass, Robert Hayden resists the elegy’s gravitational pull toward mere grief or mere…

    Issue #68 March 2017
  • The Harrow Plow

    Each spring it sank a little further down
  • In Brief: Hera Lindsay Bird, Michelle Bitting, Bruce Bond, Aracelis Girmay, Connie Wanek

    “If you slit your wrists while winking,” New Zealander Hera Lindsay Bird asks in her debut collection’s opening poem, “does…

    Issue #65 December 2016
  • Mark Yakich: Poetry: A Survivor’s Guide

    Metaphor is a form of illness. Sometimes writers ought to clothe rather than bare their souls. If we don’t know…

    Issue #64 November 2016
  • Lucia Perillo: Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones: Selected and New Poems

    Esteemed sports writer and NPR commentator Frank Deford is, at first blush, an odd choice to narrate the 2002 PBS…

    Issue #63 October 2016
  • Grevel Lindop: Luna Park

    In “O Taste and See,” one of her most famous poems, Denise Levertov rejects the brooding grimness that defines Wordsworth’s…

    Issue #62 September 2016
  • Mahtem Shiferraw: Fuschia

    “In the Lion’s Den,” a rare persona poem in Mahtem Shiferraw’s debut poetry collection Fuchsia, gives voice to the biblical…

    Issue #61 August 2016
  • Adrian C. Louis: Random Exorcisms

    Grief and irreverence rarely align in poetry. We have our wistful poets and we have our witty poets, conventional wisdom…

    Issue #60 July 2016
  • Christopher DeWeese: The Father of the Arrow Is the Thought & Amelia Martens: The Spoons in the Grass Are There to Dig a Moat

    Paul Klee, one of the most gifted and prolific visual artists of the early twentieth century, defies easy categorization. A…

    Issue #59 June 2016
  • Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Editor: The Oppens Remembered

    When Of Being Numerous won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1969, George Oppen seemed like an emblematic poet for…

    Issue #58 May 2016
  • In Brief: Bond, de la O, Denham, & Moeggenberg

    “This is how it feels, he thought, to be/the orphan of what you sacrifice to see,” Bruce Bond writes in…

    Issue #57 April 2016
  • Robert Atler, Editor: The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

    When Yehuda Amichai died in 2000, the international literary community mourned the passing of Israel’s greatest post-war poet. For those…

    Issue #56 March 2016
  • Greta Stoddart: Alive Alive O

    Greta Stoddart’s third poetry collection, Alive Alive O, takes its epigraph from the final verse of the famous Irish folk…

    Issue #55 February 2016
  • Daneen Wardrop: Cyclorama & Reginald Dwayne Betts: Bastards of the Reagan Era

    It is a strange irony that despite all of our war documentaries, battle reenactments, and tourist traps, the American Civil…

    Issue #54 January 2016
  • My Name in Sticks

    From the shallow sledding hill I gathered up