Word of Mouth

Starting in 1995, NPR's All Things Considered began presenting poets reading their own works. Introduced by "poetry DJ" Catherine Bowman, these popular short segments allowed listeners to experience poetry as a kind of verbal music, recalling its roots as a spoken art form. Word of Mouth, edited by Bowman, brings together the poems that have been featured on NPR, providing a window onto the dynamic contemporary poetry scene. A child playing with flashes of sunlight in the aisle of an airplane; a woman describing tropical fruit to someone in a faraway country; a man building a deck with his dead father's hammer; the musings of a Barbie doll participating in a 12-step program: these poems powerfully and lyrically transform the stuff of every day life. A celebration of the poetic voice that includes 33 acclaimed writers, this vibrant anthology proves beyond any doubt that poetry is far more than just words on paper.

Quincy Troupe - Czeslaw Milosz - Campbell McGrath - C.D. Wright - Jack Gilbert - Heather McHugh - David Lehman - Wang Ping - Joseph Brodsky - Paul Beatty - Lorna Dee Cervantes - Paul Muldoon - Lucille Clifton - Naomi Shihab Nye - Richard Blanco - Albert Goldbarth - Carrie Allen McCray - Belle Waring - Russell Edson - Kevin Young - Nuali Di Dhomhnaill - Charles Harper Webb - Denise Duhamel - Yusef Komunyakaa - Hal Sirowitz - Lucia Perillo - Amy Gerstler - Maura Stanton - Marilyn Chin - Philip Booth - Jane Cooper - Diane DiPrima - Elizabeth Spires
About the Author: About the Editor

Catherine Bowman was born in El Paso, Texas, and currently lives in Bloomington, Indiana, where she teaches at Indiana University. She has worked with National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" since 1995 as a consultant and commentator on contemporary poetry. She is the award-winning author of two collections of poems, 1-800-HOT-RIBS and Rock Farm. She received the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize, the Kate Frost Tufts Discovery Award, a Dobie Paisano Fellowship from the University of Texas, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, and two Yaddo Fellowships. Her poems have appeared in four editions of The Best American Poetry and in many magazines and journals, such as TriQuarterly, River Styx, Conjunctions, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, The Los Angeles Times, Crazy Horse, and The Paris Review, and in numerous anthologies. Her poems have also appeared in the anthologies A Joyful Noise, 13 Ways of Looking at a Poem, An Exhaltation of Forms, The Extraordinary Tide, Writing Down the Soul, Motion: American Sports Poems, and many others. Bowman teaches at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and in 2001 she was Writer-in-Residence at the College of William and Mary. She regularly collaborates with composer and bassist John Lindberg; together they have performed and taught workshops at a variety of venues in both North America and Europe.