Blood Flower Photo by kanegen Sometimes my gentle father texts me warnings or jokes, or waterbird photos from his walk around the lake in central Florida. Once, my father texted me what to do if an elephant charges me: watch its ears. If they are pinned back, apparently you have seconds before it attacks. Just […]
Provisions Photo by Pedro The courier asked if I was back but he knows I refuse to harvest. I only collect, marred by yellow wages and groves and writing waves of mercy, heat, or radio. I tend, in fact, to catch fractions to avoid storms of light, my fault lines. The courier relies on moths […]
Sanjeev Sethi is a mature and conscious poet—rare qualities among writers of contemporary Indian-English poetry. By mature, I refer to poets who know how to use syntax, metaphors, and imagery; how to transform ideas into well-blended verses. By conscious, I mean a person who is sure about what is being written, about the purpose of […]
Arthur McMaster’s The Whole Picture Show offers a breathtakingly beautiful portrait of everyday life. As the title suggests, the collection is cinematic in nature; it moves, frame by frame, from stories about friendship to narratives of family, travel, and the arts. The speaker is at once a teacher, a son, a friend, a husband, a […]
Noise and signal are parts of the same phenomenon, but signal is the information the perceiver wishes to detect. Noise is the random fluctuations that occur to hinder the perception or interpretation of the signal. Both are natural processes we take for granted in daily living. Jhilam Chattaraj is an academic and poet from Hyderabad, […]
The Congo River of Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s The River in the Belly is more than a river located in a geographical region or a depiction on a map. As the world’s deepest river—measuring 720 feet in depth and at certain places impenetrable to light—the Congo, as described by the speaker in each of the collection’s […]
In the “Notes” to Vibratory Milieu, Carrie Hunter describes the book as a work of “maximalist fragmentation.” She cites news media, social media, poetry, film, music, feminist theory, meditation, friends, and dreams among the book’s sources, and lists no fewer than sixty-two films by name. The surface of the text hums with contexts and meanings. […]
“A wound is a place of burial. . . Call the wound a language.” At one level, Sneha Subramanian Kanta’s Ghost Tracks may be described as a chapbook concerned with vanishing, elegy, wound—what is gone and how wound and mouth are intimately connected. The third line of the opening poem “Fifteen Ways of Saying Hunger” […]
Our expectations about what a book is and might contain are constantly evolving. In our current century, readers encounter traditional volumes, tactile texts bound with front and back covers, as well as more ephemeral e-books, texts we read on screens, whose words disappear and are replaced when we “turn” a page. A book of poetry […]
Gaja Rajan writes in the first poem of Moth Funerals, “You’ve heard this one before,” but honestly, we haven’t. Her voice is fresh and lyrical. Yes, she may tackle familiar topics such as loss and growing up, but she does so in a way we haven’t heard yet—by discussing youth not in retrospect but as […]