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Margo Taft Stever’s The Hudson Line is a collection that offers us many lyrical gifts of observation, address, tone, and insight. I found myself particularly interested in Stever’s ability to build the depth of her character’s perception with an image or repetition in lines. We meet a man who“pounds his piano / with dumb passion” and a woman who “forgot to ask him something. She forgot what she forgot to ask.” This is memorable speech. ...We know that Stever is paying attentiveness to sounds and images of English that make the language alive, make it new. ...What The Hudson Line gives us, in the end, is the work of the poet whose empathy to others, and to the very landscape, is always rooted in the detail of her craft. The detail here is crystallized into lyric, and the lyric is memorable. This is a beautiful book.
— Ilya Kaminsky

Margo Stever’s poems are brutal and tender, the natural world enmeshed with the mythic. She is a storyteller at heart, a poet of place and purpose. The Hudson Line is a vibrant and valiant telling, embracing both darkness and desire.
— Denise Duhamel

In the title poem of her long-awaited The Hudson Line, Margo Taft Stever writes, “This is a train of thieves, all of us/who never cared for our jobs or our mother’s.” In “The Quickening” she writes, “An apple sapling planted/in a hollow stump/blossoms.” Stever’s vision and language are stark and unflinching, as is the strange beauty she conjures.
— Suzanne Cleary

The Hudson Line

Poems by Margo Taft Stever

Chapbook publication by Main Street Rag,
Charlotte, North Carolina, January, 2012.

Margo Taft Stever, founder of The Hudson Valley Writers’ Center (www.writerscenter.org) and the founding editor of HVWC’ Slapering Hol Press, announces the publication of her new chapbook, The Hudson Line (Main Street Rag, 2012). For information, log onto: www.mainstreetrag.com. Stever is an award-winning poet whose readings include, most recently, the internationally acclaimed Geraldine Dodge Poetry Festival and the Shanghai International Studies University in Shanghai, China. Her first book, Frozen Spring (2002), was the winner of the Mid-List Press First Series Award for Poetry, and her first chapbook, Reading the Night Sky (Introduction by Denise Levertov), won the 1996 Riverstone Poetry Chapbook Competition.

In praise of Stever’s new chapbook, The Hudson Line, poet Denise Duhamel says, “Margo Taft Stever’s poems are brutal and tender, the natural world enmeshed with the mythic. She is a storyteller at heart, a poet of place and purpose. The Hudson Line is a vibrant and valiant telling, embracing both darkness and desire.”

A graduate of Harvard University, a recipient of an Ed.M from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and an M. F. A. in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College, Stever founded The Hudson Valley Writers’ Center, located at the restored Philipse Manor Railroad Station. In 1990, she founded Slapering Hol Press (SHP), the small press imprint of HVWC. SHP, the oldest poetry press in Westchester County, conducts a national competition to publish chapbooks by emerging poets, special poetry chapbooks, and anthologies. The SHP Advisory Committee also organizes a reading series for emerging poets at the Writers’ Center. The title poem of Driving Montana, Alone, by Katie Phillips, the SHP 2010 chapbook winner, was read by Garrison Keillor on “The Writer’s Almanac.”

With her son, James Taft Stever and Professor Hong Shen of Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China, she is publishing Looking East: William Howard Taft and the 1905 U.S. Diplomatic Mission to Asia, (Zhejiang University Press, In Press). They have also created a traveling exhibition of the 1905 mission, with photographs taken by her great-grandfather, Harry Fowler Woods. (www.ohiohistory.org/tafttrip).

Margo and her horse, Game Point, earned fourth place in the 2011 World Championship Hunter Rider Awards for Adult Amateur Hunter in the northeast region. The award is sponsored by the United States Hunter Jumper Association.