FROM THE MOUNTAIN/WEST POETRY SERIES 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 paints a complicated portrait of a bi-national speaker. The poems navigate the interplay between Mexican […]
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 […]
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, […]