Steve Davenport, Associate Director of Creative Writing at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and editor of a literary magazine in his own right, has graced our pages with a number of poems. Recently he’s been stretching his literary legs, writing his reminiscences on Inside Higher Ed about the horror show of his dissertation years — of which there were two more than there should have been, due to a deep commitment to the art of procrastination.
But Davenport managed to finish, move on and keep pen to paper. His newest book, published this year, is Overpass, and continues some of his poetic experiments, including yodel sonnets. The book centers on what he calls American Bottom — the Illinois floodplain — and follows Overpass Girl, “a breast cancer victim whose overpass allows drivers to pass over the damaged or diseased land that extends east (depressed industrial area that runs from Alton down past East St. Louis) of what St. Louisan Jonathan Franzen refers to in The Corrections as St. Jude, Land of Hopeless Cases.”
Stay tuned for a forthcoming Read More from Davenport.