What Ridiculous Things We Could Ask of Each Other
And therein lies the beauty of Schultz’s work. If he did not love the world so deeply, he could not be so deeply angry with it for its failures, its horrors, or its disappointments.
Four Poetry Books
For as much as poetry concerns itself with the various forms of eternity—Keats’s “A thing of beauty is a joy forever,” Shakespeare’s “Not marble, nor the gilded monuments of time / Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme”—the practice of poetry also initiates us into the ongoing fact of daily existence.
Barely Composed
This collection travels the breadth of the universe and the human, leaving us searching our own experiences for such richness.
Demiurge
As if a blueprint of author’s imagined garden could begin without the 28 leathern paws of 7 unassigned dogs halting, holding their howls at the edge. If you draw me a map I won’t find you. This poem is for the cartographer offering an alternate arcadia, I mean, a third arcana. I mean I believe […]
Charismatic Deliverance
I could have sworn this was a cave with thin gray branches at the opening, a perfect ellipse. No one’s home but home. No whistle over the opening. A man empties his lungs entirely, so he can sing, so we can sing. He looks down at the ground. I look at the cave and then […]
Private Booth
It’s disturbing to recall the child’s analogy of adult desire: how you were certain to be in parlor view of your grandmother’s cuckoo clock moments before the hour. That’s the suggestive silence of all the engines at rest, every toggle switch in the off position, the warehouse of robotic arms recumbent. If you’ve a mind […]
Easter
Whatever inspired that first live cell to pull a little line down the center and so become, as two, both and neither, it must have known what a child knows when he looks up at a house on fire, until, ascending, the night is day again. When I was his age, I put my ear […]
Visionary Labors of the Astoria Pool
He only likes to build it. He doesn’t live Where he swims, where the city has pieces, He means to mend them, to tear the city Pieces where it can be mended. Here At my desk, I engage in a crisis among us. What I’m doing is with my development. What I’m doing these days […]
The Verging Cities
PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry 2017 Utah Book Award for poetry 2016 Poets and Writers Top Debut Poets 2015 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award NACCS-Tejas Foco Best Poetry Book of 2015 Ninth in the Mountain West Poetry Series, edited by Stephanie G’Schwind & Donald Revell From undocumented men named Angel, to angels falling […]
The Whole Field Still Moving Inside It; Almanac
Both Bashaw and Smith are important, though under-appreciated, poets…both complicate and enliven our understanding of the increasingly dire relationship between poetry and, since poetry too is a breathing thing, the habitat in which it lives.