Margo Taft Stever is proud to announce that in April, 2022, Broadstone Books published her third full-length collection, The End of Horses. One of three winners of a 2022 Pinnacle Book Achievement Award in Poetry and a 2023 NYC Big Book Award Distinguished Favorite in the Category of Poetry, the book focuses on the sixth extinction, one of the greatest mass extinctions in the history of the earth, and the only one precipitated by humans. About The End of Horses, Denise Duhamel has written:
“The poems in Margo T. Stever’s The End of Horses mourn our irreversible ecological change, in elegiac turns and odes to the beauty that remains. The speaker’s past is recast through a political lens, turbulent and haunting in retrospect. Stever’s eco-poetry emphasizes our enmeshment with tragedies we have created. Powerful, terrifying, and gorgeous, these poems are, above all, fearless.”
The End of Horses is available for sale here.
In February 2022, Milk & Cake Press published I Wanna Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe, edited by Susana H. Case and Margo Taft Stever. Already in its second printing, this anthology of poems on Marilyn Monroe, one of the all-time greatest iconic figures of beauty and femininity, addresses questions about gender roles and their enactment, and the ways in which women attempt to negotiate the differences between their private and public personae. Because she refused to be silent about sexual abuse and male domination that she encountered, Monroe was a harbinger of the third wave feminist movement which began at the same time as her untimely death.
I Wanna Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe was not only a finalist, short-listed, and Honorable Mention for the 2023 Eric Hoffer Grand Prize in Poetry, but it was also the sole winner of the 2022 Pinnacle Book Achievement Award for Anthology. The anthology was also a finalist for the 2022 International Book Award and the American Book Fest Award, both in the Anthology category. The ninety poets who are represented include Sylvia Plath, Sharon Olds, David Lehman, Denise Duhamel, Nin Andrews, Delmore Schwartz, Ernesto Cardenal, David Trinidad, and Frank Baez. The introduction is written by Lois Banner, the founder of the women’s history movement and author of ten books, including Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox (Bloomsbury, 2012). The anthology is available here. All proceeds from the sale of the anthology will go to RAINN, the largest U.S. organization that fights against sexual violence.
In April, 2019, CavanKerry Press published Margo Taft Stever’s full-length book, Cracked Piano, which was shortlisted and received honorable mention for the 2021 Eric Hoffer Book Award.
From her compelling descriptions of life inside a nineteenth-century insane asylum to her colorful and often critical depiction of elements of contemporary society, Stever’s poems profoundly speak to us. She speaks to us about our interactions with each other and with the natural world. Each poem tells its own story that captures us and makes us think.
As poet Fred Marchant states, “The taut, unflinching lyricism of this work reminds us of the courage it takes to see our lives as they are. These are poems that affirm the saving grace that we remain ready and eager to sing in our sorrow, even if the accompaniment is only a cracked piano.”
Her chapbook, Ghost Moose, was also published by Kattywompus Press in April, 2019. The chapbook is about our present and future during the ongoing sixth extinction.
Crescent Moon over the Hudson River. Tarrytown, NY. Photo by Margo Taft Stever.
© Margaret Fox Photography
Margo Taft Stever is an award-winning poet whose readings include the internationally acclaimed Troubadour Café, London; Bowery Poetry Club, New York; Geraldine Dodge Poetry Festival, Newark; and the Shanghai International Studies University, Shanghai. 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. Her chapbook, The Hudson Line, was published by Main Street Rag in 2012. In 2015, Kattywompus Press also published her chapbook, The Lunatic Ball.
Margo Taft Stever is 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. After establishing the Sleepy Hollow Poetry Series at the Warner Library in 1983, Stever founded the Hudson Valley Writers Center, located at the restored Philipse Manor Railroad Station, an organization which she directed for seventeen years. She also had overall management responsibilities for the station restoration. For several decades, she was the primary fundraiser for the building renovation and for the Center.
In 1990 she founded Slapering Hol Press (SHP), the small press imprint of the Hudson Valley Writers Center, and served as co-editor until February, 2024. Slapering Hol Press is now one of the oldest poetry presses in the United States. SHP conducts an annual national competition to feature chapbooks by emerging poets and publishes special poetry chapbooks and anthologies.
In the SHP Conversation series, a well-known woman poet chooses an emerging poet to appear in the same chapbook with an interview at the end. The celebrated poet Elizabeth Alexander served as the first Conversation poet before Barack Obama chose her as his first inaugural poet. She chose Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon as her partner in the first Poems in Conversation and a Conversation (Slapering Hol Press, 2008). In 2024, Slapering Hol Press published Graffitied Heart by Ellen Bass and Kendra DeColo, and in 2022, SHP published The Mothers, by Dorianne Laux and Leila Chatti.
The SHP Advisory Committee also organizes a reading series for emerging poets at the Writers Center in Sleepy Hollow and numerous offsite readings including many 2022 Zoom readings and one in person reading at the 2022 New York City Poetry Festival. In Spring 2021 Larry Carr wrote and published an article on Slapering Hol Press in his new literary magazine: Lightwood, Life and Arts in the 21st Century. Andrea Deeken’s chapbook Mother Kingdom was a finalist for the 2022 International Book Award in the Chapbook category.
From 2020 to 2022, Stever has participated in many Zoom poetry readings from various places around the United States and the world. Here is a link to her Zoom performance with poets Stephanie Strickland and Connie Post in the Poetry Flash Poetry Series generally held at Moe’s Bookstore in Berkeley which took place on February 21, 2021.
Stever has given poetry readings at the Emily Dickinson Museum, Amherst; the Grolier Poetry Book Shop, Cambridge; KGB Bar, New York; Poetry Flash at Moe’s Bookstore, Berkeley; the Troubadour Café, London; the Bowery Poetry Club, New York; the Geraldine Dodge Poetry Festival, Newark, and the Shanghai International Studies University, Shanghai.
In 2015 the University of Cincinnati and Zhejiang University press collaborated on the publication of the English-language version of Looking East: William Howard Taft and the 1905 U.S. Diplomatic Mission to Asia, The Photographs of Harry Fowler Woods (Orange Frazier Press, 2015), by Margo Taft Stever and her son, James Taft Stever. The book is a narrative historical analysis of the 1905 mission, accompanied by hundreds of antique photographs taken during the trip. In 2012 Zhejiang University Press published the Chinese-language version of the book. Looking East was chosen in 2013 as the “book of the year for international cooperation and promotion” by Zhejiang University Press. Comparable to Stanford University in the United States, Zhejiang University is the third largest university in China.
She also created a traveling “Looking East” exhibition of the 1905 mission with photographs by her great grandfather, Harry Fowler Woods, which was featured numerous times including most recently in 2018 and at William Howard Taft’s birthday celebration at the William Howard Taft National Historic Site in Cincinnati, Ohio; The Nippon Club in New York, New York; the View in Old Forge, New York; and Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China.
The Woods family donated the five original photography albums to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. In 2018, with the assistance of the Friends of William Howard Taft National Historic Site, Stever donated the exhibition to the Cincinnati Museum Center. She also donated a hard drive of the H.F. Woods photographs of the 1905 Mission and of 1905-06 photographs of Burma, India, Egypt, and Greece to the Cincinnati Art Museum.
Our cat, Ferninand, and I are dreaming of summer. Photo by Margo Taft Stever.
From 2011 to 2023, Margo Taft Stever and her husband, Donald Stever were proud partners of an organic farm, Generation Farm, which was established by her son, James Taft Stever. He and his wife, Marley, currently operate the farm.
Stever is also an accomplished equestrian. Several years ago, her horse Landau aka Game Point, developed neurological problems and had to retire. She rode in the Adult Amateur Division at the Wellington Equestrian Festival in Florida and in the large northeast horse shows. Visit the Riding page for more information.
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From Oscar Pak’s film about the Hudson Valley Writers Center, 2018.
PRAISE FOR CRACKED PIANO
— Fred Marchant
author of Said Not Said (Graywolf Press)
In the rarified world of the unwell, sense and senses fool both the speaker and writer into a language of mysterious compromise. The persona in “Animal Crackers” recalls eating crackers bought by the mother and devouring them thinks, “Once again, I want to be perfect/ like the elephant./ I want to be thin.” In Cracked Piano Stever introduces us to her great grandfather Peter Taft (half-brother of the president) in a Cincinnati asylum and through poems based on his letters, we experience the abject loneliness of a young man who is not even permitted to touch his own child. That he was probably wrongly diagnosed and treated with medicine that we now consider poison is as captivating as it is heart-wrenching. The reader is also guided into the realm of other perceptions where an army chaplain describes the “mushroom cloud” as beautiful (yes, it is beautiful, ironically, if one could live to tell of that vision); where Van Gogh feels his missing ear; and where UPS men carry out funeral rites by delivering ashes. And so Stever reconstructs perception in this insightful and straight-forward collection, Cracked Piano.
— Kimiko Hahn
author of Brain Fever
(W. W. Norton & Company)
PRAISE FOR THE HUDSON LINE
— Ilya Kaminsky
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.— 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
PRAISE FOR FROZEN SPRING
Margo Taft Stever listens to every sound, every edge of word that she uses here, so to “get said what must be said” in an otherwise brutal world. She is an impeccable poet, and this book proves it absolutely.
— Robert Creeley
Unfolding in a series of surprising metaphors and startling linkages, Margo Taft Stever’s lyrics move us from the ordinary into a realm of imagination and language whose only name is poetry. — Billy Collins
This collection of poems includes horses and oceans, a lost life of orchards and fields, the ghost of a dominant mother, a dead father, five siblings, and numerous half-suppressed fears for the poet’s own children. For this wonderful first book, the natural world plays a major role—sometimes harsh, sometimes lyrical—but always beautiful.
— Maxine Kumin