Our Poem of the Week is an ekphrastic piece from William Snyder, a North Dakota poet who has appeared in the pages of 3rd Wednesday a number of times. It’s a preview from our fall issue, which should be out near the end of September.
Tag: Third Wednesday Magazine
Cityscapes – Rebecca Ruth Gould
Traversing the urban geographies of the Middle East, South Asia, and Europe, Cityscapes offers searing and intimate portraits of Damascus, Yerevan, Hyderabad, Delhi, Isfahan, and many other cities through the lens of war, peace, love, and despair. The collection opens with poems about the cosmos, before moving to earthly urban topographies, and concludes in a series of still lives chronicling urban spaces. Gould combines the insight of someone who has resided in the geographies she describes with a poetic gift for generalizing her personal experience. Includes original photography of Palestine (Gaza and the West Bank), India, and Armenia.
Rebecca Ruth Gould is the author of the award-winning monograph Writers & Rebels (Yale University Press, 2016). She has translated many books from Persian and Georgian, including After Tomorrow the Days Disappear: Ghazals and Other Poems of Hasan Sijzi of Delhi (Northwestern University Press, 2016) and The Death of Bagrat Zakharych and other Stories by Vazha-Pshavela (Paper & Ink, 2019). A Pushcart Prize nominee, she was a finalist for the Luminaire Award for Best Poetry (2017) and for Lunch Ticket’s Gabo Prize (2017). This is her first poetry collection.
Published by Alien Buddha Press, Cityscapes is available at 
Midwest Medley: Places & People, Wild Things & Weather – Patricia Williams
Patricia Williams planned to write about Chinese art after retiring from the University of Wisconsin – Stevens Point, as a professor of Design History. Things took a different turn and in 2013 she began writing poetry – proof that it’s never too late to do something new. Life, like poetry, is always subject to revision.
Wisconsin Library Association Outstanding Poetry Book written in 2018.
I’ve read lots of poetry and appreciate a good poet’s careful and often spare use of words. Patricia Williams belongs to that group. In two of my favorites, “The Midwinter Night is Long” and “Magic in Collapsing Stars” much is expressed in a few words about the aspects of being human. I especially like the poignant lines from “Islands” and the great story, vast application and wonderful ending in “There Goes the Neighborhood.” – Jerry Apps, Award-winning author of 35 books on rural history and country life, Professor Emeritus, University of Wisconsin
Williams’ intimacy with the Midwestern countryside, its souls and circumstances, tumble forth from these well-crafted poems. We sojourn through “the season’s bullying chill” as “gales sweep the lawn clean of needles” and sense the “mortuary stillness” before a twister. In lovely language, her Midwest Medley resonates elegant simplicity and truth. — Nancy Austin, Author of Remnants of Warmth
Patricia Williams’ poems about “the middle of America” virtually glow with the beauty – and many of the irresistible quirks and foibles – that she finds there. Some gleaming freeze-frames of winter are particularly stunning, as in “The long-night moon / shimmers over a glacial setting / polished by winter’s breath”. We’re also treated to Williams’ fresh take on the area’s Great Indoors, where we feel right at home under the antlers and beer signs of the Northland Bar and Grill or crashing a sing-along with Aunt Mae at the player piano. Williams’ guided tour through a part of the country too often bypassed (or flown over) is a poetic experience not to be missed. – Marilyn L. Taylor, Wisconsin Poet Laureate, Emerita
Midwest Medley: Places & People, Wild Things & Weather is available at:
Someone Left the Ocean Running…
Our Poem of the Week form poet, Kelli Russell Agodon. It appeared in Volume XII, No 3.
Write Us a Poem on a Paint Chip
Just for fun, give it a go. Pick one of the colored tiles. The title of your poem is the printed name on the paint sample. Write your own poem in the reply section. It should be short enough that it would actually fit on a paint chip. We have no plans to do anything with these.
Official Business – Ted Kooser
Though he didn’t intend it for our recent One Sentence Poetry contest, 13th Poet Laureate of the United States, Ted Kooser, sent us this example of what a poet can do with a single sentence.
And Then Snow – Phillip Sterling
Phillip Sterling is the author of In Which Brief Stories Are Told (short fiction, Wayne State U. Press 2011), and six collections of poetry: And Then Snow (Main Street Rag 2017), And for All This: Poems from Isle Royale (Ridgeway Press 2015), Abeyance (Frank Cat Press Chapbook Award 2007), Quatrains (Pudding House 2006), Significant Others
(Main Street Rag 2005), and Mutual Shores (New Issues 2000). He is the editor of Isle Royale from the AIR: Poems, Stories, and Songs from 25 Years of Artists-in-Residence (Caffeinted Press 2107) and Imported Breads: Literature of Cultural Exchange (Mammoth 2003) and served as the founding coordinator of the Literature In Person (LIP) Reading Series at Ferris State University, until his retirement in 2013. Phillip presently serves as an associate editor with Third Wednesday Magazine.
Flash Fiction Contest
Time is running out –
Echo – Jennifer A. McGowan
Our poem of the week comes from the Summer issue of 3rd Wednesday. It was part of series of mythology inspired sonnets by our featured poet, Jennifer A. McGowan.
As One Fire Consumes Another – John Sibley Williams
3rd Wednesday contributor, John Sibley Willams is the winner of the Orison Poetry Prize for his poetry collection, As One Fire Consumes Another.
John Sibley Williams confronts the violent side of American history and its effect on our notions of self, fatherhood, and citizenship. […] The poems, which veer from elegiac to declarative to prayerlike, drill down into the beliefs and fears that underpin this violence.
–Poets & Writers
John Sibley Williams’ collection As One Fire Consumes Another transcends beyond the boundaries of family and history and country, beyond the body’s tragedies, the “silenced bones of others.” These poems rise as invocation, as testimonial to life’s unfiltered beauty, violence, and faith, to the “light . . . already in us.”
–Vandana Khanna, judge of The 2018 Orison Poetry Prize
John Sibley Williams is the author of the poetry collections Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize), Disinheritance, and Controlled Hallucinations. He serves as the editor of The Inflectionist Review and has edited two Northwest poetry anthologies, Alive at the Center (Ooligan Press, 2013) and Motionless from the Iron Bridge (barebones books, 2013).
As One Fire Consumes Another is avialable from Orison Books and at Amazon.
Third Wednesday Magazine 