Killing
How the blade was not sharp enough.
How a duck’s neck is supple as a thick piece of rope.
Famous Tombs
Bees crowd the statuary, topiary.
White trees where the orchard used to be.
Low hills spotted with honey, the barn
Accuracy
The invention of consciousness
was as brutal as it was the birth of the past
tense. The past itself not a place, but the echo
On the Worst Day of the Fever
It occurred to me that I had swallowed
some shards of mirror without realizing it.
There was an ice fog that descended
and left me shaking. I began to realize that
I’d never actually held an entire conversation.
Two Reviews: New Works from SplitLevel Texts
Carla Harryman…and Catherine Meng…each offer an expansive poetics, suggesting that the inherited conventions of poetry afford new possibilities when presented with the documentary tasks inherent in many non-literary types of prose writing.
Through the Second Skin
Sheffield’s language is mined from observation and reflection. His imagination is grounded in flora and fauna and in the words we use to make sense of ourselves.
Orange Roses
Lucy Ives does not tell us how to find meaning in our lives, but she demonstrates its constant loss and rediscovery in her new poetry and essay collection, Orange Roses.
Under the Sign
It turns out that ordinary mortality is the only limit to this openness, and here, we recognize that Lauterbach, for all her intellectual flights, is a poet among the people, concerned with universals. In her work, we recognize ourselves.
Swamp Isthmus
The beauty of this collection, formally and thematically, is the brio Wilkinson brings to the task of making sense out of and though form.
Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire
Hillman has a penchant for including everything: she loves the sibilance and buzz of both creature and machine.