From this rich literal and figurative vein, Peterson mines the many forms of interchange—cultural, economic, familial, linguistic, political, sexual—that color our lives as individuals and as members of clans, couples, marriages, nation-states and workplaces. Each relationship mints its own form of currency, these poems suggest, and an individual must reconcile the value she brings to each with the value ascribed to her contributions by others.
Without future, I sharpen, I flint. // Flushed as I am with fever, I’ve dismantled / my cloud of fright, whispers spent // on nights under the wrong moon.
Today, I do not think about death, not the brittle / skulls of children or the metal in their blood / that could pass for bullets.
Then something changes. Fire licks along the interstate’s / plunging edge, Styrofoam plates of rice and sucked bones / are left out for yard dogs.
My father put the bat in a glass jar, after, / though I’m not sure that’s the whole story. / I never saw and can’t be certain.
One of the great pleasures of reading across Keelan’s body of work is seeing how these concerns and images evolve over time. Even as her formal concerns change, Keelan continues to return to the literal heart, defamiliarizing it each time to give our own a jolt.
We, too, have seen this kind of semidocumentary poetics before; whereas the rummaging of personal effects has led to sentimentality and self-righteousness in several recent collections, Isako Isako eschews both easy nostalgia and sensationalized, one-dimensional politicking.
Frederick Seidel has long taken pleasure in the absurdities of everyday American life. Under his scrutiny, the blandness of a chain store—a deeply American sight—becomes hard to distinguish from more scandalous forms of commerce.
Sixteenth in the Mountain West Poetry Series, edited by Stephanie G’Schwind & Donald Revell Furthest Ecology takes up the life and labor of Abbott Thayer, the prickly, irrepressible American painter and naturalist nicknamed “the father of camouflage.” In 1896, Thayer discovered countershading, also known as “Thayer’s Law,” the theory of animal coloration often credited for […]
Akant troubles the borders between life and death, between consciousness and the unconscious, through a ‘gohst’ that figures—often in the space of a single poem—as sometime speaker, sometime subject