The thing about dad jokes is that they’re not for you; they’re for your father. They’re chances for him to let off some steam; to not seem so harsh after he keeps telling you, “No, for the hundredth time, you cannot have ice cream for breakfast”; to show off the wordplay he usually keeps to […]
MPH and Other Road Poems by Ed Roberson (2021) Verge Books There’s a line Emerson writes in “The Poet” that has, for thirty some years now, struck me as a kind of truth: “For all symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not […]
These poems imbued with issues of climate and racial justice bristle with sound, word play, the everyday and the exotic, and numerous moments of beauty.
Akbar invites his audience to read between the lines and find his shadow story—the truth he doesn’t share outright, but that unveils itself with each page turn.
From his perch of eyewitness, Lynch presents to the literary canon his deeply considered treatise on the meaning of life in all of its mystery and death in its inevitability.
I stamp my foot in applause, write notes on the pages, distribute my thoughts; Swensen makes of “viewing” a muscular verb.
I wasn’t raised to trust or believe in chance. I was raised to believe nothing happened except by merit of the effort one put into the task at hand, the work one consciously and deliberately put toward a goal. And with enough work, one got what they had justly earned. Chance had no place in […]
Written in a time of loss and disaffection, the fatigue in these poems is insidious. The poems do not owe to a single event—not COVID-19 or Trump or random brutality or exploration of personal loss. But the effort to cognitively self-create requires intensity of purpose, greatly like making a poem from a world that comes […]
In June Photo by Shiva Shenoy A wood duck cuts a slick path through the lily-padded pond crowded thick with growth. This morning a deer hung his low-slung throat towards the water, sipping shallow wet, pulling tangled masses of green into his mouth. I think, what a bright day god has given, what a way […]
Thoughts from Roman Nose Trail Photo by Peter Weemeeuw All this time spent thinking about one lifetime and now, everything’s one thing, every- thing’s a rag that hangs from the oven handle, catching the anticipated light that breaks the rain and lets the day carry about its business while I, the passenger, watch as I, […]