Michael Heller’s poems, now available in their imposing entirety in This Constellation Is a Name, more often than not take place in both a figurative and a literal sense, for Heller brings a traveller’s—not a tourist’s, mind you—keen observing sensibility to bear on everything around him.
Read More - This Constellation Is a Name: Collected Poems 1965-2010
Addressing the morning I say
It was good of you to come
Read More - I Am Glad of Your Arrival
1 The interior holds out its leathery hands. It wants to take me to California Where technicians will construct my head, And where the streetlights are broken yolks And small furry things crawl up my legs. 2 I decline the offer so the interior flips a switch Which makes my teeth cold as though I […]
Read More - Farewell, Interior
I. Before the invention of glass, time was not translucent. Mostly it kept to itself, bandaging the wounded, sleeping inside the minerals that formed below our restlessness. Sometimes a volcano spit out a fugitive star—it cooled into obsidian, a window we could neither repair nor see through. But its arrows taught us the meaning of […]
Read More - Narrow Hallways
In The Final Take, Susko seeks to record something that puts to rest the aftereffects of having survived, making out of poetry a kind of prolepsis that fills the void of an apocalyptic delay. And so the poems trudge toward a horizon that rips across the skyline like a mass grave as the attempts at memorializing, at making things appear by keeping time, ultimately falter: “Then you disappeared, that is / what happens in wars.” Finally, it is disappearance itself that appears in the wake of these vanishings.
Read More - The Final Take
Evans’s A Penance, though not perfect, challenges readers in a way that requires them to continuously re-read the text in order to plunge the depths that he has constructed. This collection should be required reading for anybody interested in contemporary poetry, especially if a reader has become disillusioned by the overbearing “I” or the gilded forms of surface experimentalisms that grow dull after one reading.
Read More - A Penance
There is a set of instructions one should follow before reading Sally Keith’s The Fact of the Matter. First, make a knot with your hands by wrapping your fingers around one another and gripping them tightly.
Read More - The Fact of the Matter
This poet is an interdisciplinary artist and the visual presentation of Listening for Earthquakes is as delightful as the content. Prose poems, formal verse, and free verse share the pages equally, as do experimental forms that stray from expectation.
Read More - Listening for Earthquakes
In that layering of story and persona, these writers engage with the suppleness of female experience in ways that are not only formally and aesthetically engaging, but have an ethical potency that permits the agent of the poem to be many things at once: simultaneous.
Read More - Four Chapbooks
Seaton’s project is a map which curves intricately, reflexively, and suddenly becomes a globe.
Read More - Fibonacci Batman: New and Selected Poems (1991–2011)