Of the major Australian poets writing in the final decades of the twentieth century, Martin Johnston (1947-1990) bequeathed readers the slimmest oeuvre. Johnston’s reputation rests on his latter two collections and sixteen late lyrics, almost all of which are preserved in Beautiful Objects, a new selection of Johnston’s poetry. Johnston’s work is characterized by erudition […]
Rodney Gómez’s Arsenal With Praise Song offers a world of bones and horns, of rivers and deserts, of lungs, chests, hands: Gómez’s arsenal is elemental. The collection mines histories and performances of violence, with sources as varied as news stories, films, photographs, and Frances Glessner Lee’s dioramas of crime scenes. The opening poem, “Warbler,” moves […]
In his notes to the book-length poem Sift, Christian Hawkey observes how the project developed from a prompt: to sustain poetic engagement with the contemporary Moroccan philosopher Abdessalam Benabdelali, namely an essay from Benabdelali’s volume On Translation, a volume that Hawkey had begun to translate with Marouane Zakhir. While the process of translation obviously led to the generation of […]
One of the defining characteristics of “the modern” has long been a heightened consciousness of its evolutionary position in history, a place whose cultural context encourages a reassessment of our sources of literary authority. Hard to imagine a future poetry that will be anything but modern in this specific sense, especially given political, economic, and […]
How to Erase One’s Descent “and only he who descends into the nether world shall rescue his beloved” —George Oppen, “Of Being Numerous” We begin with a problem. As if attempting to descend into this text was not enough, and as if the coming explanation on how to erase one’s descent was not enough, we […]
What Lot’s Wife Said Photograph by Daria Volkova New Year’s Eve, 2020 turn back and you’ll turn to salt— there is only ash and the lick of flame along your hip the body’s a pillar in darkness, skin white as a moon and a crescent of bone like the arc of a bow pulled taut […]
When They Come for You Photo by Thomas Millot Police came through with a loudspeaker and said everyone needed to be out by 9 a.m., or else face arrest. [This despite] a ruling by the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that was effectively sustained by the US Supreme Court in December declar[ing] that […]
Parable Photo by Enguerrand Blanchy One summer, two kookaburras mated on a power line, extinguishing light in a thousand homes. Stories say the female opened her wings and touched two wires. Closing the circuit. Making, of her body, a conductor. And his, attached to hers. Witnesses gaped at brilliant flashes, cacophony like drums. The birds, […]
At the end of his new book, Frank Bidart ridicules Hamlet for thinking “the rest is silence.” One wonders what the difference might have been had the young prince said “the rest will be silent,” and perhaps Bidart hears Hamlet’s final words as prophecy when, in fact, they speak in present tense. Prophecies are about […]
Organized into five breathtaking sections, Andrew Hemmert’s memoir-in-verse, Sawgrass Sky, dazzles me with its visceral coming-of-age tropes and bestial symbols. Hemmert does not hold back as he reveals the spiritual angst he endured as a child growing up in Florida—his descriptions of picturesque and at times macabre landscapes intersect with painstaking reflections on childhood. In […]