On Thin Ice (with Jacques J. Rancourt)

The queens spin into a frosty finish with poet and figure-skating stan Jacques J. Rancourt! What a way to celebrate our 50th episode!

Please support the poets mentioned in today's episode by buying their books. Shop indie if you can; we recommend Loyalty Bookstores, a Black-owned bookseller in DC. You can buy Jacques's Brocken Spectre here. 

Find Jacques J. Rancourt’s website here. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @jj_rancourt. Read Jacques’s “Golden Gate Park” from Brocken Spectre on Poetry Daily here. 

Writing for the Los Angeles Review Erica Charis-Molling says this of Rancourt’s Brocken Spectre: “Much like the phenomenon after which the collection is titled, the search for answers is part ghost hunt and part investigation of an illusion. Through the eyes of these post-AIDS-epidemic poems, we thoughtfully look at the ways the virus is both a thing of the past and very much present.” Read the whole  review here. 

If you want to know more about what Tonya Harding (who was banned for life from the US Figure Skating Association) is up to these days, here's a pretty great article. Short answer: she's chopping wood, sending Cameo vids, and raising a son with her 3rd husband. Watch Harding become the 2nd woman (and first American) to land a triple axel in competition (1991 US Nationals) here around the 0:50 mark.

You can read several poems by Adélia Prado here, courtesy of the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College.

If you're into incredible jumps, you've got to see Surya Bonali's infamous backflip at the Nagano Olympics. (3:45 mark)

Geri Doran’s first book, Resin, won the Walt Whitman Award and was published in 2005 by LSU. Her second book, Sanderlings, was published by Tupelo in 2011. Doran's third book, Epistle, Osprey was published in 2019 (also by Tupelo) -- and we are sorry not to have gotten that right before the fact check! (Thanks, Katy Didden, for the help!)  Read "Tonight is a Night Without Birds" from Resin here. 

Watch Carolina Kostner’s 2014 spellbinding “Ave Maria” performance here. 

James's favorite Lucie Brock-Broido book is Trouble in Mind.  Read "Leaflet on Wooing" from that book here.  Watch Brock-Broido read "Freedom of Speech" here, dedicated to Liam Rector.

Hear Lisel Mueller (1924-2020) read "Monet Refuses the Operation" here (~2.5 min).

Check out Aaron Smith's latest book of poems, The Book of Daniel,  and James Allen Hall's book of lyric essays, I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well.

Because it’s Breaking Form, we'd be remiss if we didn't include at least one scholarly resource. Here's this article titled “Shirtless Figure Skaters: 14 Hot Hunky Men on Ice.”