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 […]
[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 […]
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.
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 […]
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, […]
feature image from Dougtone. [hear the author read this piece by clicking this link.] It was a church then it was a barn with church windows then it was a photograph of a church-turned-barn. It was a photograph of the church-turned barn no longer standing and the standing of the boy who just woke beside […]
feature photo from Travis S. I took a wrong turn into a sun mask on mud, into straw-glue and smashed yucca. If you saw them rub feathers on their arms, if the claws of bear wrapped them, if the porcupine and badger were sewn to the skin, if gusts of God flew into lightning-riven […]
Nick Courtright’s stunning first collection of poems invokes the everyday as a point of entry to compelling philosophical questions.
For all the innovation and diversity in contemporary American poetry, there is a lexicon that can sometimes feel familiar, a predominant voice at once colloquial, elliptic, and discursively metonymic.
A Forgetting Of, by Colleen Lookingbill, is a visionary work that ranges through one woman’s experiences with a wide-angle lens that, at the same time, reveals our culture in all its prismatic detail.