Luxury
Today, I do not think about death, not the brittle / skulls of children or the metal in their blood / that could pass for bullets.
Leaving Red Rocks
Then something changes. Fire licks along the interstate’s / plunging edge, Styrofoam plates of rice and sucked bones / are left out for yard dogs.
Caricatures
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.
We Step into the Sea
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.
Isako Isako
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.
Peaches Goes It Alone
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.
Furthest Ecology
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 […]
Babette
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
how do i net thee
Who, or what, can be captured in such open forms is this book’s question, and it asks it in the aftermath of personal and familial loss.
Appendices Pulled from a Study on Light
The poems and prose in Appendices Pulled from a Study on Light thus delve into Babbitt’s passion for illuminated manuscripts, his confessed object of reverence.