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 […]
The 1977 educational film Powers of Ten begins with an aerial view of a couple picnicking in the park—a strange perspective, as if we were giants. Over the next five minutes, the video zooms out at the rate of one power of ten every ten seconds. We see the park framing the picnic blanket, the […]
In Will Harris’s Brother Poem, the lines between reality and dreamscapes blur, and readers dwell in the visages and myths an individual creates about oneself. Each poem hangs like its own word cloud in a vast, verse-filled sky. Deeply sensitive and acutely self-aware, Brother Poem carefully dissects familial complexities, difficult relationships, and love and living’s […]
Midlife is a reckoning with our experience of time. The past seems impossibly far away. The future feels foreshortened. This phase of life demands that we take stock of who we are in the present and make peace or changes before we die. The 51 poems in David Groff’s haunting third collection, Live in Suspense, […]
Jackson Holbert’s debut collection, Winter Stranger, winner of the Milkweed Editions 2022 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, considers the surprises in grief and the unexpected reminders left by the dead for the bereft. The speaker, a young man negotiating his own demons and drug addiction, constantly apprehends signs of a presence: a beloved lost one, personified […]
A few years ago, thanks to the magic of the internet, I bought a copy of the 1969 Norton Edition of Ronald Johnson’s Valley of the Many-Colored Grasses. I probably paid too much for the state it’s in; it’s an ex-library edition, with browning pages, staples in it, stamps, etc., but the design exudes Johnson. […]
Set during the wider context of the global pandemic and within the personal history of the speaker’s grappling with cancer, Nancy Naomi Carlson’s Piano in the Dark looks at the latent danger within “everything in nature,” as in a startling untitled villanelle she dedicated to her late sister-in-law, Roxanne Miller: Everything in nature contains its […]