She was attacked by an owl?!

I'm happy to have restarted things here at The Tongue is an Eye, and if you're stopping by to read, drop me a comment! It doesn't have to be anything significant or even pertinent, but I'd just love to know there's some of you out there stopping by now and again. And thanks for your time!

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This is terribly sad: A Harvard-trained biology professor is facing murder charges in the shooting deaths of three faculty members at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, police said early Saturday.

Sincerest thoughts and prayers go out to the families and friends of the victims. Who knows why the professor acted as she did, but I hope that the university is able to counsel the other faculty members and students so tragically affected by this awful situation.

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A beautiful and stunningly sincere essay by Jennifer K. Sweeney has been posted over at Poetry International's blog:

The barred owls nested in tree holes lined with feathers or grass along the path I followed each evening to eat dinner, my head spinning the day’s new fragments around, slowly reawakening my senses in the cold snap of air. It was such a night when I was struck upside the head and brought down to the forest floor. Disoriented and dazed, I assumed fallen branch only to look up from my knees and see a female barred owl flying off, her three-and-a-half-foot wingspan sweeping slowly and silently through the alders. I found out later that barred owls have fenestrated wings which make no sound, and I can attest that this is so.

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I've never read Barbara Guest (aside from a few poems here and there), but thanks to Brian Teare's gorgeous write-up of her Collected Poems in a recent issue of Boston Review, I'm ready to dive right in!

Without The Collected Poems, we could not have known for sure that the tremendous change animating her work emerged amid bedrock constancy. All along, her poems have been most faithful to the moment mimetic and linear logics give way to association; her poems have courted the moment when writing through process gains true access to imagination.

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More later.