For Today

Carolyn Hembree is the author of Skinny and Rigging a Chevy into a Time Machine and Other Ways to Escape a Plague. She is associate professor at the University of New Orleans and serves as poetry editor of Bayou Magazine.

Carolyn Hembree's For Today is a wild ride of formal innovation, odes, and elegies. Any reader would be taken with the poet's modified sonnet crown, her villanelle, her prose poems, and the musical opus that is the gorgeously long title poem. But I am most impressed by how Hembree manages all of this while also daring to write a poetry so sharp and bare it aims at nothing but the heart." - Jericho Brown "Startling poems. A wondrous recreation of form." - Toi Derricotte "A high-voltage talent, Hembree harnesses the fevered elements of what's given-fraught landscape, fraught heart-because to do otherwise is to live (and write) a lie that denies love its innately fuguelike truth. These poems spun my reading swiftly into awe." - Katie Ford "The long poem 'For Today' is a brilliant, existential tour de force. I read it in one sitting. I couldn't stop. And it gives me that sense that I experience with the very best poems, that I'm not reading them so much as living them." - Rodney Jones "For Today is a sensuous, extended meditation on intergenerational succession: the perils and ecstasies of raising a child in a time of dying parents, of trying to care for dying parents while raising a child. Inger Christensen is Hembree's day-sign here, and Rilke her night-sign, but the title poem is very much its own achievement, one of the most ambitious long poems in recent American poetry. It is an extraordinary testimony of resilience, troubled immanence, and the ferocity of love." - G. C. Waldrep