at sunrise I say light shut up reset the dashboard clock while swerving a travel mug rolling in the passenger footwell that was not, it turns out, spill-proof boulder in the rearview, like some molecular rushing outran its invasive historic wearing away pitted weed against parasite and hollowed out my placeless worry left my initials […]
When I stared into the alpenglow When I dared to drink the water and water was nil When silence was a flock of sheep, and a path a line broke my concentration Planes lifted above our heads when it was easy to manage the remote and was easy I touched the base of a sycamore […]
We Who Saw Everything is a vast mnemonic for the event of our speaking of the secret, the mysterious, the dead.
A poet who urges us to hold dear to all of our experience: that which was, that which is, and that which, someday, will no longer be.
“I work it,” [Armantrout] writes in the title poem, “until sweetness // rises / of itself.” And we are all made wiser by it.
Agnes Martin isn’t painting any scene. Her grids portion out forms of emptiness. And so she gives to us a picture of our deepest philosophic condition. How do I find meaning in nothingness? I make it.
The persistent species of poem known as the “self-portrait”—hardy, it would seem, as the Pacific eucalyptus, as enduring as the horseshoe crab—has drawn its lifeblood since its inception from a certain vein of irony that has managed to endow the species with more than narcissistic interest. One of its earliest specimens, Rilke’s “Self-Portrait, 1906,” frames […]
Of course, the genius of Honest James is that it engages with the trouble of disjointment in content, in form, and in sign and symbol. It knows itself as “an imitation of a tapestry,” as a simulacrum of a simulacrum, and goads itself from this intertextual mise en abyme of poetic and textual reflection, seeking metaphysical the reality of flection itself.
Through a collection of poems quiet in tone but unflinching in conviction, Klink explores the complex relationship between the body and solitude. The energy and drive behind each poem is clear, the result of copious thought and time spent with the world.
At its most basic level, Fred Moten’s The Feel Trio does what Herodotus did: it sets down the world as it can be known in order to preserve desire and experience, and keep it from passing unremembered into non-being.