D. R. James
D. R. James (james at hope dot edu) is the author of the full-length poetry collections Mobius Trip (Dos Madres Press, 2021), If god were gentle (Dos Madres Press 2017), and Since Everything Is All I've Got (March Street Press 2011); and seven poetry chapbooks, including Why War (Finishing Line Press, July 2014), Split-Level (Finishing Line Press 2017), Surreal Expulsion (The Poetry Box 2019), and Flip Requiem (Dos Madres Press 2020). You can download and print his foldable micro-chapbook All Her Jazz at Origami Poems Project. Individual poems have appeared in a variety of print and online anthologies and journals.
James earned an M.A. in literature and composition from the University of Iowa and an M.F.A. in Poetry from Pacific University. He retired in 2022 from nearly 40 years of teaching, college writing, literature, and peace studies and lives outside Saugatuck, Michigan, with his psychotherapist wife Suzy Doyle.
Poet Chris Dombrowski, author of Ragged Anthem and Body of Water, says about Flip Requiem, "In this deft and prescient collection, D. R. James has both diagnosed our 'dizzy symptom' and scratched out the vital prescription: holistic poems that enact a rigorous mind's engagement with this tenuous age, or what James calls, with his wink-light touch, 'the more sober / though no less precarious rest of our lives.' Despite their modesty, and in a voice that is comic, molecularly honest, and fern-gentle, these poems accomplish the grand task of embodying authentic compassion, and in so doing lead the reader through 'the puzzled tongue of mourning,' into the rarefied empathetic that is, line by supple line, accessible to us all."
Poet and editor of Rise Up Review Sonia Greenfield says: "The poems in Surreal Expulsion are both topical and wise as they address the human condition, and they deftly walk the line between gravitas and levity. Some of that levity comes from the very apparent love D.R. James has for the sound of language and the potential for word play that arises from the making of meaning."
About If god were gentle poet Kwame Dawes (author of City of Bones and Duppy Conqueror: New and Selected Poems) says: "There is, in D. R. James’s elegiac collection, If god were gentle, a surfeit of intelligence and sentiment even as he engages the most ordinary stations of our living. The familiar—parenting, loving, dying—is re-visioned with distinct poetic beauty that is preserved in the “salt and ice” of disciplined craft and gentle irony. James is a reliable and consistent observer of our times who, thankfully, brings to his verse the welcome vulnerability demanded of truth-seekers."
And poet Susan Blackwell Ramsey (author of A Mind Like This, winner of the 2012 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry) says: "While titles like "Writing My Way Out of This Paper Bag" and "Right Before Whatever the Next Thing Is Kicks In" are irresistible, at the heart of If god were gentle is a determination to confront pain and regret with language, language that slices away excuses and self-defense. This is an act of bravery."
About Split-Level poet Jack Ridl (author of St. Peter and the Goldfinch and Practicing to Walk Like a Heron) says: "D.R. James has a way of working in first person that requires the poet to put aside the diary and journaling just for now. He takes us, not to himself, but through himself into experiences that should bring out the best in us. His "I" is a place where vulnerability has a collision with whatever comes along. James is not searching for the Paradisio. He hunkers down into the well-earned safety of being right here."
And Best of the Net poet Rob Kenagy says: "In Split-Level, garages become temples, sons become oceans, and the poet becomes a crow navigating connection and collapse. These poems are located and lost. Caught and dislodged. Familiar and full of awe. D. R. James breathes into us an awareness of life's strange realities with reverence, tenderness, and humor. The past and the present play across the page like the memory of a cornfield plowed under by a subdivision."
About Why War Dawes says: "D. R. James's value to us lies in how he faces the idea of now with all its uncertainties, complications, and mundane realities, and then, as if driven by a missionary compulsion, he makes elegant, moving, and insightful poems about this 'nowness' of death, divorce, war, and much else. This is the immediacy and compelling force of Why War. James has no answers, but he has a sharp wit, a capacity for emotional risk, and a contagious delight in language. Give me that, any day."
About Since Everything Is All I've Got poet Fred Marchant (author of The Looking House and Full Moon Boat) says: "This is D.R. James's book of wonders. It brims with the hard-earned wonder that comes through love and loss, and through his assay of the mysteries of the heart, the psyche, or the soul. In the spirit of Thoreau, these poems plumb the depths of experience, probing as far as language and feeling will allow. Distrustful of sham or self-delusion, James is nonetheless hopeful and in search of what is authentic, reliable, and real at the center, something that literally re-minds us that we are vividly alive. These poems chart his journey to those moments when we sense that our lives--in joy and in sorrow--are truly here and inescapably now and everything is all we have."
Selected online individual poems:
https://www.southfloridapoetryjournal.com/issue-17-may-2020.html
https://www.moriaonline.com/issue-five-640718/2020/4/27/after-the-gale-by-d-r-james
https://www.theravensperch.com/atop-mt-harvard-may-1976-with-a-line-from-major-jackson-by-d-r-james/
https://jerryjazzmusician.com/2020/02/a-collection-of-jazz-poetry-winter-2019-edition/
https://amethystmagazine.org/2020/02/02/entering-winter-with-a-line-from-gwendolyn-brooks-a-poem-by-d-r-james/
https://www.escapeintolife.com/poetry/d-r-james/
https://www.backchannelsjournal.net/dr-james-two-poems-3
http://www.rogueagentjournal.com/djames
https://mockingheartreview.com/volume-4-issue-3/poetry/d-r-james/
https://www.fromwhisperstoroars.com/store/from-whispers-to-roars-volume-2-issue-2
https://writingforpeace.org/d-r-james/
https://redriverreview.wordpress.com/?s=d.+r.+james&submit=Go
https://www.unstamatic.info/endnotes
https://bulletsintobells.com/2018/07/10/surreal-expulsion/
http://www.writersresist.com/2017/08/31/upon-recognizing-yesterdays-well-meaning-poem-was-still-as-paternalistic-as-ever/
http://tuckmagazine.com/2017/09/14/poetry-1006/
http://sisyphuslitmag.org/2018/07/the-27th-of-january-2017/
http://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/ekphrastic-van-gogh-writing-challenge-results-la-guinguette
http://www.riseupreview.com/DR-James.html
https://www.origamipoems.com/images/Microchap/D.R._James_-_All_Her_Jazz_2018.pdf
http://verdadmagazine.org/vol23/poetry/james.html
http://www.muddyriverpoetryreview.com/D.R.%20James.pdf
http://www.verse-virtual.com/d-r-james-2017-october.html
http://tuckmagazine.com/2017/09/14/poetry-1006/
http://www.soul-lit.com/poems/V17/James/index.html
https://thegalwayreview.com/2017/06/22/d-r-james-three-poems/ (Ireland)
http://mobiusmagazine.com/poetry/whywar.html
http://heartjournalonline.com/drjames
http://www.rattle.com/contrails-by-d-r-james/
