The many doors within Ann Lauterbach’s dazzling eleventh volume, Door (Penguin, 2023), open onto mythic dreamscapes and echoic worlds of vibrant sound. Seven poems in the volume share the name “DOOR,” and almost every page returns to this image, as though knocking and knocking at the various available meanings that could open. In a conversation […]
A four-in-hand is a vehicle drawn by four horses and driven by one person. The term, however, also refers to one of the simplest methods for tying a necktie. This narrow and slightly asymmetrical knot can be completed in four quick steps to transform a casual outfit into one suitable for formalities. In either case, […]
In 2020, amidst devastating wildfires and insurrections and a pandemic, we all seemed to collectively agree that we were living through the end of the world (or to quote an internet meme and the title of one of these poems, “This Is the Darkest Timeline”). But isn’t someone’s world always ending somewhere? The poems in […]
In his ecopoetic collection the luxury, Darren C. Demaree draws upon the four classical elements of water, air, fire, and earth to connect their associative power to the mutable and erratic nature of our contemporary natural world. Formally structured as a series of untitled poems comprised of three linked tercets, this collection juxtaposes human perception […]
At one point in their debut poetry book, Content Warning: Everything, New York Times best-selling author Akwaeke Emezi’s (they/them) speaker is “a ragtag doll / scraps from men or places where I left myself / even when my pieces were taken. . . .” By the end of this poem, titled “confession,” Emezi owns up […]
In Nicole Cecilia Delgado’s elegant, bilingual collection adjacent islands, readers discover a minimalist world where the sparsity of the languages is key to connecting with nature. Readers are also privy to correspondence between the author and the translator. In this correspondence, the translator offers an insight into the collection’s true essence—how it “tackles the untranslatability […]
Midway through Pink Noise, Kevin Holden’s second full-length collection, there appears what one might take as a statement of method: What if it were all abstraction but I had put a page within the cover not a frontispiece but in its place what if I had put as the second or third page before the […]
Photo by Trinity Nyguyen on Unsplash how “gracious” means “large” at least with respect to houses and maybe also old or beautiful the first time I was in a house one might say this of it was a suburb of Boston in high school for the day with my friend while her mother taught Saturday […]
Photo by Single.Earth on Unsplash It’s June and I turn and turn my wet leg in sleep, in hopes of making a poultice. There is so much to learn here, in this place where fire does the kind of good violence we need it to. Already I have taken to calling this valley floor peat, […]
Photo by Maël Balland on Unsplash Before there were such small machines, there were augurs plying their trade in every paper. Dear Scorpio, they’d write, the stars are aligned for you this week, but be suspicious of promises of sudden wealth. I spent my dimes and quarters on candy, and was susceptible to flattery. I […]