A Poet's Labor Bears Fruit
Blood Work, a prize-winning collection of poems by literature and creative writing faculty member Matthew Siegel, will be published this spring. In a recent profile, Siegel called the volume the natural outgrowth of a long and consistent effort. 鈥淵ou produce poems like a tree produces fruit, or something. It鈥檚 just something that you do. And sometimes the fruit is good, and sometimes the fruit is not good. But you can improve the pruning, so increase the chances of it being good by reading certain things and by thinking about poems in certain ways, and really loving it.鈥 Blood Work won the University of Wisconsin Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. Siegel has also had works published in journals including the Cimarron Review, Indiana Review, Southern Humanities Review and TheRumpus.net.