Photo by John Fowler Here’s the cat. The stars. Water boiling. “Oh, I never thought that would be.” Seven minutes and forty-three seconds into Brahms’s Fifth Symphony. A shotgun blast. Sun on the empty chairs. Rattle of most anything, something on the roof. Rattle of most anything, something on the roof. A shotgun blast. Seven […]
Photo by Rick Harris Such sounds. Your mother in the kitchen over a pot of stuffed cabbage, crying, Istenem, istenem, istenem and you answering her back, There is no God God is dead he’s dead my brother is dead. What should I say about your brother in the attic with a gun? He left you […]
Photo by Doug Beckers Bone by bone, she remembered what it was like to change from body into light, that the month of March had had no time for grief and tore up her belly until there were just black plums there like ancient letters split in two— al-eph, b-eyz, gi-ml, da-led. She recalled she […]
Biespiel grapples with global crisis through the lens of the individual—specifically the relationship between two lovers. It’s a particularly affecting lens to adopt given that individual nihilism is a practically universal response to systemic crises like climate change, poverty, famine, and the potential for nuclear holocaust.
O’Leary so brilliantly makes language itself a rhizomatic experience, a syntactical force that allows the reader to experience directionality and conjunction in the language as a consequence of the luminous simultaneity of the natural world. The tactile, concrete details and sensuous quality of the words combine to make a deeply strange sense out of a word-picture that’s fully worlded without being fully grounded. It’s astonishing.
Scanlon’s poems operate at the moment of enjambment between the last two lines above, the ostensible rejection of all the “bowing and beseeching” of the invisible world that turns out to be the heart’s fullest desire, albeit a private one.
Seventeenth in the Mountain West Poetry Series, edited by Stephanie G’Schwind, Donald Revell & Kazim Ali 2020 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award in Poetry Winner “Jami Macarty’s poems draw us into the vagaries of human love, just as they implicate us in the ‘menagerie of the surviving world.’ These marvellously immersive poems of the Sonoran Desert […]
Daniel Poppick’s second collection, Fear of Description, features a collection of sonnets, elegies, and autobiographical essays that examine both a crisis of a generation and a crisis of the self. Through a careful examination of formal restrictions as a means of accessing truth, Poppick attempts to establish trust and beauty within language. In these tests […]
It presents a tension as well for the reader: if silence is total absence, an obliteration, how is “nothingness” described?
The collection begins with dramatic monologues and portraits, cinematic and enigmatic, that are more traditionally structured with left-justified lines and regular punctuation.