Rust or Go Missing
The poems of Lily Brown’s debut full-length collection risk utterances that make belief an appealing, if not necessary, episteme again.
Enigma and Light
If a poet’s work is words—the words that call forth the sun, that cause the sun—the poet’s work must be a site of divination, a place where the poem both creates and causes the world.
Negro League Baseball
Her poems are chronicles that frame their own engagement; in terms of Holiday’s kinetic, long line of hybrid prose, it seems the page moves toward bursting.
Somewhere in Maine an Old Dream Staggers On
Spell the name slowly before you come, as I have asked you to come, bearing me a sea-blue porcelain platter piled with what remains of what Maine was. As I said, the name can be that of anyone you wish never to see again, knowing if you did, your life, and happiness, were you to […]
Children Dug Out of a Parsley Bed
Oxeye daisy with its petal rays, unassuming eyebright’s honey spot. I found a wildflower called Alma Potschke. Lilium, lady’s thumb, rosy pussy toes. Violet patch by bean pot, apple tree. Wild rose on Henry Street. Scent, messages, allusive flower, special name. Great Aunt Violet’s beloved primroses, her exquisite virgin’s bower. Who better understood than any […]
Still Life with Nervous Animals
Too much was stolen that day to change his mind. What grew on the goats stayed on the goats as he fell into himself. The revolution was flattered, talked into a microphone that resembled a human body. Misery assembled with a peculiar silence, diseased and searching through his childhood. But it was the years afterwards […]
The Hyssop Tub
[hear the author read this piece by clicking this link.] Then, as Thy self to leapers hast assignd With hyssop, Lord, thy Hyssop purg me so And that shall cleanse the Leapry of my mind Make over me Thy mercys streams to flow So shall my whitness scorn the whitest snow To eare […]
Place: New Poems
Every so often, someone comes along who seems to defy neat categories, an American writer who is neither an Alice nor a Mabel—or is a little of both. We are fortunate to have such a writer in Jorie Graham.
Upper Level Disturbances
Third in the Mountain West Poetry Series, edited by Stephanie G’Schwind & Donald Revell Kevin Goodan’s poems embody a quiet, incandescent fierceness, fueled by loss but still able to seek and find a place to dwell, despite the upper level disturbances he encounters in the disappearance of rivers, the uncertainty of—and fissures in—language, the elusiveness […]
PASSIM AN ADMONITION
feature image from wili_hybrid. fly back what you’ve dealt indelible name, seeds pine needles actually needles stiff as though or large her hands shape white scars in the air in death valley in a lake bed (“the racetrack”) spooky stones dig out tracks (“peripatetic” “ice collars”) war makes its ghosts irritable, all the incursions, […]