I Am Glad of Your Arrival
Addressing the morning I say
It was good of you to come
Farewell, Interior
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 […]
Narrow Hallways
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 […]
The Final Take
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.
A Penance
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.
The Fact of the Matter
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.
Listening for Earthquakes
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.
Four Chapbooks
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.
Fibonacci Batman: New and Selected Poems (1991–2011)
Seaton’s project is a map which curves intricately, reflexively, and suddenly becomes a globe.
Grammar
At turns beautiful and disconcerting, Grammar presents us with a thought-provoking portrayal of language as it is transfigured by our usage, offering readers a graceful matching of form and content all the while.