Jul, 09 2020 | no responses
In Prageeta Sharma’s collection of poems, her husband’s sudden death makes vivid their emotional and personal differences. Her grieving is intense and messy. Without the other to complete her understanding of the space she occupies in the world, she is ghosted. “I feel you inside but not in space” she writes in “Between Sighs.”
Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition
Jul, 07 2020 | no responses
At another point, she asserts, “The question is who to be writing this.” Writer, mother, farmer, teacher, wife, student, reader, traveler: Fishman is at one time or another all of these throughout this book. But first and foremost she is the poet the work has chosen her to be.
Jul, 06 2020 | no responses
Photo by Dave Grubb My family asks me to try to deepen my voice, sitting at the dinner table, my sexuality a tapestry they are coming close to unthreading. I look down at my plate, moving fishbones with my fork, and beneath the mess of food, a print of hunters in red coats chasing the […]
Jul, 06 2020 | no responses
Photo by Biodiversity Heritage Library In the end what I know about earth is what was sold to me. What I know about myself is what I wouldn’t buy. One man sold eels. They hung oddly muscular from the stand’s brow or just beveled on ice. It stands to reason an eel could meet the […]
Jul, 02 2020 | no responses
We delight in the distractions of the circus, though we understand its wonders are illusions, our voyeurism and demand for entertainment perhaps culpable in the continued othering of those outside the sanctioned norm. And though we begin to see where the line between reality and dream have been laid, begin to see the structures that fix that line and by extension the barriers it creates, the us and the them, we choose to follow it.
Jul, 01 2020 | no responses
Rather than this dissipating energy, however, Stobb uses the material to perform serious, nearly Buddhist thinking. Infused with elegiac hope, the poems hover on the cusp of an enlightened release of all worldly things—and a deep reluctance to give them up.