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
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.