Writing to a half-brother he didn’t know, Shane McCrae tells a powerful story of longing across race, distance and lies–a story of “water in a fist” where the brothers are “not the fist/…not the water/we the thirst.”
Writing to a half-brother he didn’t know, Shane McCrae tells a powerful story of longing across race, distance and lies–a story of “water in a fist” where the brothers are “not the fist/…not the water/we the thirst.”
“When thought goes a long way away from the point, apply heat/and observe its tracks.” Taking her own advice, Rusty Morrison traces a mind through illness, noting the ways in which, “Indistinguishable from body’s surface, a net/of symptoms floats.”
“Still the heavy kick drum of the bull-man’s gait shakes the boy’s gut,” writes Oliver de la Paz in this opulent version of an ancient myth. “Still the labyrinth gathers its boundaries in redundant corridors.”
A masterful poem of suffering, storytelling and gods from Alan Shapiro, in whose hands “the rank and file/Massed for a sleep walk into corpse fires” can become, for a moment, “A figure now for storm clouds out at sea.”
“LISTEN TO THAT.” Stephen Motika makes his own original music in writing the life, work and migrations of a composer who once asserted, “tongue must couple with the cavity or there’s no resonant tone. yes, this is sexy.”
V. Penelope Pelizzon strings her time in a mining town together with stories of an early coal baron, the workers who opposed him, and the art in the museum that bears his name, hunting “Illuminations sharp/enough to catch…/dark earth’s plunge/to underworlds where men still crouch to free/the stone whose flesh is flame.”
In one of the two prose poems here, Rachel Zucker deals with a friend’s death, her unreliable memory and her fascination with another poet known only as “one.” In the other, Elaine Bleakney begins, “This is the beginning of talking to you: deer in the yard,” setting off a series of meditations that cover a terrible job, a traumatic labor, and culture shock.
Marly Youmans‘ chronicle of a fool in search of his king is a rollicking tour through the traditions of English literature and the pleasures of the language itself. Introducing her hero she writes, “He shakes his rattle at the dark/And fills his antic hat with leaves.”
Starting from a six-sentence obituary that ran in 1855, Adam Tavel crafts a riveting sequence of letters and monologues invoking suicide, infidelity, race, and the “bent trumpet of grief” that echoes over generations.