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 offers an introduction to Brossard’s erotic lyricism and the span of her queer feminist thought and conversations over the years.
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.
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 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 […]
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, […]
Empire is “a shattered sequence” that dismantles settler logic and the ideological underpinnings of manifest destiny on the American landscape. Acknowledging the destruction of pre- and post-colonial American land as a consequence of whiteness, this collection employs inherited form—most notably the sonnet—to demonstrate this perpetual haunting as cultural and environmental erasure. The poems in Tracy […]
There is an artistic paradox here: wherever a scar forms, nothing else can grow.
Proximity is often a necessary discussion tool for intimacy. Not that there is a prerequisite distance prescribed to intimacy, but that distance and closeness can both be influencing factors in burgeoning relationships. The direct and possible results like becoming fonder of someone are so tangible and tantalizing, yet we always seem to be in discussion […]
Poetry is engaged to dreams or a dream-state, and the surprising word-choices shift us into a world where clocks drip