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.
William Wright’s long narrative poem Bledsoe is immersed in the deep Appalachian South. The opening sections trace young Durant Bledsoe’s strange encounter with a yellow king snake and his parents’ efforts to lift the resulting sickness that has rendered the boy mute and timid. Later sections of Bledsoe take Bledsoe and his mother up to a mountain den to see Vaney, a medicine woman.
[hear the author read this piece by clicking this link.] Dream of the attic. Light pours through a lonely window. Everywhere crevices. A pool of old rain. You say, where there is water there are wolves. Spiders are drawn to piles of skin. Attics are lovely in the morning, though. Whatever wolves are lurking must […]
the clear water that holds up your boat. The water was clearly built to buoy the boat. It’s like how TV shows buoy the dead. After they’ve died, there they are, their kind faces float just out of reach like a rescue. Like that tiny island. I promise I’m not making this up. Today the […]
Again they can’t find anything In the pantry (even when you point Or turn on the light) they keep The heat Down to save All they have and they have A dog that keeps them Up at night (and other concerns Like where to bury Their landslide eyes At dusk) and dusk Means helping them […]
I Want to Make You Safe is the follow-up to 2009’s Slaves to Do These Things (BlazeVOX) and a maturation of its logic. The books are linked formally and thematically, though I Want to Make You Safe demonstrates a sharpened sense of King’s style, which she uses to perform surgery on the subject and the object.
Against a poetic landscape filled with ironic detachment, Aaron McCollough’s work is refreshingly earnest. No Grave Can Hold My Body Down, his third collection from Ahsahta Press, finds the poet unabashedly working through issues of faith and belief, framed within the context of the Christian tradition.