Seaside Ghazal
we shouted out of car windows / uttered our incomplete goodbyes // see you later, Shifting Inlet / or whatever good friends say // who haven’t known each other long—
Prayer for Appetite
What whispers suckle, tugs / spines upright, name god. // Acolytes—mice sniffing / a wet breeze, blouse milk- // soaked at an infant’s cry, / universe ever expanding.
Oh cosmic through line,
teach the weaker sex your
bruising grip.
Beyond Love
If the saints are to be believed, if this body is a dress / we slip into, out of, if each day and night is the mantle / we tie around our shoulders, fabric thin as the time it takes
Marriage Abstract
I love you like my hands, which haul / the money in. Into our laps spill daughter / and son. We are drowning in wine and beer, / carrying each other across these rooms, / glasses filled above our brims.
Wherever We Mean to Be: Selected Poems 1975–2015
The most solitary poems, the ones that take the speaker for a walk through a city or down a dirt path, through a churchyard or a garden, always remind one of how important it is to spend time alone, getting to know your own universe.
I Know Your Kind
Brewer investigates how drug use has ravaged a community and the lives of users, enablers, and those fortunate enough to have survived.
Service
Much of the difficulty in relating our perceptions of the world has to do with naming, and it has always been this way.
The Happy End / All Welcome
No matter how many hours we may be chained to our office chair, no matter our posture in it, or how Sisyphusean our work life may seem, our imagination is a small and gleeful subversion taking place under the glare of the office gods.
We Remain Traditional
Fifteenth in the Mountain West Poetry Series, edited by Stephanie G’Schwind & Donald Revell In We Remain Traditional, Sylvia Chan juxtaposes the elegy, the conflict, and the brashness of a relationship that summons wild musicality in its love and frustration. Through the speaker and Adam, the beloveds offer thirty-two consolations for the gendered history of Chinese […]
The Lapidary’s Nosegay
Fourteenth in the Mountain West Poetry Series, edited by Stephanie G’Schwind & Donald Revell The Lapidary’s Nosegay, Lara Candland’s primer of poems, presents to readers a bouquet of resplendent poems that Candland has created, collaged, curated, and reimagined by using the rich floral and gem imagery in the poetry of Emily Dickinson as her primary […]