Bare Neck of the Woods
My ma // said agony // said hurt // said she’d be // damned // if pain // ain’t the one // thing all folk // say’s true // says all folk bow // when pain // huck // her elbow // across they neck
Lush
I’m looking // at a scrap of fog a quarter mile off / and wondering / if I touch a cedar here, / will a cedar there feel my affection / at the rate / of three inches per second, / or if I bite it, if I tell it / I’m lonely for what it has / though swaddled / by learning yet again / where intelligence hides, how thoughts flow / through air and ground / in a way I can’t invent, only destroy. I don’t know
how I’ll ever prune a tree again
My Mother as an Instrument of the Divine
Before stamping out her own breath, my mother / rehearses the act in tiny permutations. Flowers // assailed by some rare malevolent illness / are mercifully plucked from their beds. // Family photos are similarly liberated, one day / collaged in cracking and scrupulously assembled // volumes, the next scattered over floorboards / without respect to date or theme. I am 25.
Bad Queer (Homunculus)
In a moonless mattress of night / I made a boy of you. // In a heaven without hair / the trees strip off their leaves // like an ill-fitting dress. // With a mouthful of petals the boys / acted their buck racks & ten points. // History is a family of wifeless nail-biters. // Welcome to heaven where we already know / you’re lying.
Yield Architecture
Throughout this collection, Syersak reconfigures and responds to art, philosophy, poetry, and history by directly addressing them. The “dear” of “dear architecture” that opens this collection represents the structure of address—what Syersak calls the “apostrophic pose”—that this book endeavors to build through matter and language.
Silk Road
In these poems, delicately and profusely braided together in a loose narrative of nine sections, Daneen Wardrop envisions medieval life in Venice and the Silk Road through the eyes of Marco Polo’s wife, Donata Badoer.
Anatomic
After having an impressive series of tests run on his body, Dickinson uses poetry as his laboratory notebook. The poems in Anatomic record data, suggest hypotheses, provide context for discoveries, and lay out the subject’s reflections.
The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter
Winner of the 2018 Colorado Prize for Poetry, selected by John Yau Selected by John Yau for the 2018 Colorado Prize for Poetry, The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter, Gillian Cummings’s second book, gives voice to her version of Ophelia, a young woman shattered by unbearable losses, and questions what makes a mind unwind till […]
Holy Moly Carry Me
And while many of Meitner’s meditations are brutal and anxiety-laced, what’s also clear is this collection believes firmly in the power of goodness. The world is dangerous, but not all hope is lost: It can be immeasurably beautiful, too.
Indictus
How indeed can we know any better than to pretend in our cultural discourse that the past is past, that sexual violence is over and done with for survivors? Eilbert offers an alternative, holding open the wound by concretizing the spaces left by trauma and the shape a telling makes around the traumatic act.