Franklin reminds us that Tragedy may be the most appropriate response to tragedy in this fierce and accomplished work. Living with past trauma enlightens the present day at every turn, showing itself in small things. We contain tragedy, give tragedy a different voice, bounce tragedy off our environs and our reading lists, and still, there […]
In a time of environmental and civic toxicity, Lindsay Turner attends to our flailing integrity in her second collection, The Upstate, which opens with a screencast image of contemporary Eden and closes in contemplation of human need. Between, Turner introduces the effects of industrial pollution, seeks to weave protective spells in her community, and ultimately […]
Leah Nieboer’s stunning debut collection of poems, Soft Apocalypse, captures the visceral experience of a body—cosmically alone, contending with illness, often on the move—as her dislocated speaker passes through a series of fractured sites and shadowed scenes. Spare, crystalline lyrics with minimal capitalization and punctuation are scaffolded by prose poems at irregular intervals, each one […]
Twenty-second in the Mountain/West Poetry Series, edited by Stephanie G’Schwind, Kazim Ali, Dan Beachy-Quick, Camille T. Dungy & Donald Revell Written at the convergence of imagination and memory, A Face Out of Clay delves deep into childhood experiences and cultural identity. Through eloquent verses and poignant imagery, alternating between narrative and lyric poems, the book […]
Photo by Jon Sailer on Unsplash Something there, smaller and meaner than before— where the palm of the hand rests on the collarbone— ails me. I’m sure that’s where the shame is. How it shrank like an old walnut, what was once the locust-heart of summer. The meadowlark’s V for victory over the yellow […]
Photo by Umanoide on Unsplash The orchestra ambushes me with Mahler’s Fifth. I never played; I have no innate sense of music, so it’s a shock to feel the brass ransack my body. Stop I rasp when the trumpets make my edges blur and a solo horn tugs my soul through my throat. Stop. […]
Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash I must remember to open the cabinet of forgotten things. That’s where the bottles are. Bottles of solutions that enhance memory. Or do they stoke the imagination? I think I recall the lock’s combination. Isn’t it the date of a French king’s death? Or the net worth of […]
Photo by Andrew Eihausen on Unsplash After Edgar Kunz’s “Piano”¹ My father is the kind of dying that acts as reminder. When I call I can hear, through clearness, breath. All the signs of the living he does are dying signs. He is a messenger. I wish I could drag his body sled-bound, […]
In the title poem of Āina Hānau / Birth Land, Brandy Nālani McDougall asks, “na wai kēia mo‘olelo hānau?”—“Whose birth story is this?” The book answers: these poems are the story of all of Hawai‘i: land, plants, animals, every ancestor, every child. This expansive collection stretches across Hawai‘i’s history while McDougall, the Hawai‘i Poet Laureate […]
Having read the title poem three or four times, I’m still unsure if the rock is, or is not, a rabbit. Probably it isn’t. Whatever is in the field appears to be animated only when a breeze ruffles the grass and is likely to be free from hunger and fear and rabbit lust, unable to […]