Variations on the Interior of a Moment
Feb, 20 2020 | no responses
Photo by John Fowler Here’s the cat. The stars. Water boiling. “Oh, I never thought that would be.” Seven minutes and forty-three seconds into Brahms’s Fifth Symphony. A shotgun blast. Sun on the empty chairs. Rattle of most anything, something on the roof. Rattle of most anything, something on the roof. A shotgun blast. Seven […]
Feb, 20 2020 | no responses
Photo by Rick Harris Such sounds. Your mother in the kitchen over a pot of stuffed cabbage, crying, Istenem, istenem, istenem and you answering her back, There is no God God is dead he’s dead my brother is dead. What should I say about your brother in the attic with a gun? He left you […]
[Bone by Bone, She Remembered]
Feb, 20 2020 | no responses
Photo by Doug Beckers Bone by bone, she remembered what it was like to change from body into light, that the month of March had had no time for grief and tore up her belly until there were just black plums there like ancient letters split in two— al-eph, b-eyz, gi-ml, da-led. She recalled she […]
Feb, 20 2020 | no responses
Biespiel grapples with global crisis through the lens of the individual—specifically the relationship between two lovers. It’s a particularly affecting lens to adopt given that individual nihilism is a practically universal response to systemic crises like climate change, poverty, famine, and the potential for nuclear holocaust.
Feb, 04 2020 | no responses
O’Leary so brilliantly makes language itself a rhizomatic experience, a syntactical force that allows the reader to experience directionality and conjunction in the language as a consequence of the luminous simultaneity of the natural world. The tactile, concrete details and sensuous quality of the words combine to make a deeply strange sense out of a word-picture that’s fully worlded without being fully grounded. It’s astonishing.
Feb, 03 2020 | no responses
Scanlon’s poems operate at the moment of enjambment between the last two lines above, the ostensible rejection of all the “bowing and beseeching” of the invisible world that turns out to be the heart’s fullest desire, albeit a private one.