Vogelsang strives to reject mystery as a sacred notion; or, at least, that’s his literary and aesthetic feint. No matter how devotedly he focuses on the concrete, however, the presence of the invoked “What” still remains as central to the poem as “Things.”
Nicholson’s writing, which is by turns clever, jokey, and devestatingly ironic, seems to be so because there is no other way. There is no other permission granted us other than irony: the irony of irony.
The poems in Heliopause are nimble, intelligent, playful, and bold; there is wildness and surprise in the journey of each poem.
The poems of Evening Oracle began in ritual, as a taking down of the messages of nightfall. When brought together and combined with the voices of trusted others, they become a book whose reading itself is a ritual creation of space, of a threshold between.
Faizullah goes beyond the self to write about and translate tragedy, as well as explore the right of a poet to speak on tragedy. In this case, the 1971 Bangladesh war as told through the testimonies of women survivors, as well as the poet’s own family history.
Miller’s task is to remove the fixed barrier that has separated public from private and past from present while exploring the topics of debt, violence, and family.
It’s not so bad once you get used to it—
August’s algal bloom on the farm’s
manure lagoon
photo by Jeff Clover Dear Japan, Dear Ambient Author, Dear Oh, Dear Trans- figuration Boy, Dear Chemical Girl, Dear Fiber of My Fire, Dear Big Red Scarf, Dear Halloween Buoy, Desire and lists. The idea of me—that hash-marked outline that universally precedes me by mere moments—writes this to you. I trust it to say everything […]
Walk into the woods and keep walking.
Swensen’s poems, arranged on the page in windowlike, prose-shaped blocks, do what the best poems do: they carve holes in what would otherwise be opaque walls, mediating for her readers a view into spaces we would otherwise never see.