wyrd] bird
Stancek opens a dialectic between the speaker and mystic Hildegard of Bingen that will surface, recede, and resurface throughout the collection.
Small Hours
Photo by Okta Sardianto on Unsplash This evening the sky above the horizon was a purple band but thin and unconvincing, like a bad belief and the ivy climbing the stone buildings was disconsolate and wouldn’t look at me. Disbelief can be astonishment or godlessness, depending and sometimes I feel good and sometimes there’s only […]
Walking at Night
Photo by Tania Malréchauffé on Unsplash Remember: headlamps, worn to move through total darkness. We hit the road too late, by the time we pulled into the parking lot, twilight, then even less than that. New Hampshire winter, days done early. I liked being in dusk with you. An arrow of lamplight let me see […]
The Earliest Witnesses
These poems teach us about the sacrilege and sacraments of ingestion, the body our only meager portal to the shining world that isn’t it.
West : Fire : Archive
Nineteenth in the Mountain/West Poetry Series, edited by Stephanie G’Schwind, Kazim Ali, Dan Beachy-Quick, Camille T. Dungy & Donald Revell West : Fire : Archive, Iris Jamahl Dunkle’s magnificently wide-ranging new book, traverses both ground and history to create a new genre: a dual biography (Charmian London’s) and autobiography (the poet’s own). Ultimately questioning what […]
Avant Desire: A Nicole Brossard Reader
Avant Desire offers an introduction to Brossard’s erotic lyricism and the span of her queer feminist thought and conversations over the years.
Wound from the Mouth of a Wound
Through this story of disobedient femininity, of a body turned against itself, of beginning with an ending, we are able to peer into the layered complexities that follow.
original kink
What is it to write according to a socially engaged poetics, to demand of one’s audience a reckoning, and not lose sight of poetry’s ability to speak out of and beyond the present moment? In a year that has seen social justice movements refuse to be sidelined, what might a poet add to the collective […]
Rough Song
Rough Song represents the first English translation of Blanca Varela, a major figure in twentieth-century Peruvian poetry who died in 2009. Though Varela’s work has been widely admired by leading international intellectuals—contemporaries such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, André Breton, and especially Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz—her verse had never been translated into English until […]
Sense Violence
The Swedish title of Helena Boberg’s second collection, Sinnesvåld (translated as Sense Violence by Johannes Göransson), appears fairly straightforward at first. “Sinnes” refers to the senses and “våld” means violence. But, as with the poems themselves, the title’s etymology is more complex. Sinnesvåld was published in Sweden in 2013, two years after Boberg’s first book, […]