Poetry
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from Shadow Self
“Surrounding my great-grandfather’s life and death, I sensed an intentional silence.” Mixing prose memoir and poetic imagination, Karen Holmberg tries to reach through that silence into her family’s immigrant history.
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What We Call a Mountain in the Valley, They Call a Hill on the Mountain
“Can you conjure a love that substantial,” asks Jaswinder Bolina, holding poetry up to everything within this country’s reach, “a lyric / more American than the one in the bed of the penitentiary // nestled between soybean fields?”
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![Meditation with [ ] Inside It](https://atlengthmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/IMG_0357.jpg)
Meditation with [ ] Inside It
In a series of meditations on violence, data, language, nationalism, awe, indifference and more, George Kovalenko tangles America is its infinite detail: “so little depends upon those permanent shadows, / their respective casters immolated and offered up to the altar / of Example, tongues so deep in cheeks we wonder if what walls still // stand might bleed.”
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Gratitude for Nothing
Responding to a friend’s poem and playing on the phrase “Thanks for Nothing,” Alan Shapiro offers an intricate song of praise to nothingness–“blind giver and dumb taker, / my stone deaf end / and origin, whom / I pretend / hears me pretend / to thank for being”–that is also an exquisite poem of gratitude for all the hunger that led to “this last, this / best love.”
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Marigolds
“Anxious as seaweed, over the sides of the ships / creep hordes of trembling locators.” In this poem of seeking, Sumita Chakraborty summons ghosts and summons, too, words and weight crushing enough to pin them down.
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For Lynn, At Lake Nockamixon
“How is it we can go through / Our lives without being routed or sent // To madness,” asks Ernest Hilbert in this measured poem of gaping loss, “wild with all we want, / And filled to vastness with all we view?”
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Greenwood Cemetery
“I am trying to tell you in a foreign language / What everybody knows at home,” explains Destiny Birdsong. “I may well have been a worthless / Child, but my mother kept it to herself.” Out of violence and loneliness, in a sequence of elegies, she writes toward a place to belong.
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Brooklyn Antediluvian
“Look how far / a name can travel, borne by a brown body,” writes Patrick Rosal, weaving family history, far-flung places, word origins, new myths, enduring injustice, hunger, streets, and relentless blossoming. “The horses snorted down from the hills’ / crests with no one but her to witness // how a steed mid-gallop flops over so fast / and so hard it opens like a rose.”
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Sing Sing
Tired of prison, a failed muse tries to draft a letter of apology to her parole board. “For the record,” she writes, “I never was a god. I am / spirit same as you, / moving body to body / through the years.” By Tomás Q. Morín.
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Eight Lo-Fis
“I believe in Music, / maker of all that, though / never quite, is as that / which was should have been.” H.L. Hix’s Lo-Fis loop “what does not happen there” and what did not happen here, making much of what’s not quite.
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He Would Always Love Painting More
“Don’t explain. It was an honor // to have been your goat, small / brained and hungry, your wind // advertising all it touched.” A beautiful new poem of art, love, and insufficiency from Jenny Browne.
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Familiar Stranger
“Sliced in half, / I hold this rolling sound, / this heart shaking off / its hinges,” Jane Wong writes, shuffling, arranging, seeking connections. “The small heat of my arm nestles / in among the pines.”
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Natural History
“We are in a great dying,” Robin Beth Schaer writes to her infant son, pulled by love for him into the the history of a world in decline. “Intricacies / of milk and sleep dismantle me. I empty / myself into you, hollowing by the ounce. // There are seven white rhinos when you are born. / A year later, six.”
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Two Movies
“look at what the lord has made. / above Missouri, sweet smoke.” Danez Smith scripts heartbreaking films of racism, violence, anger, grief, endurance, and love, concluding, “I believe when a person dies / the black lives on.”
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Shooting the Skulls: Devotionals
“No skull stays silent. Each spills its neglects.” In a brilliant new sequence of sonnets, Paisley Rekdal tries, in a time of war, to find voices for the abandoned skulls unearthed on the grounds of the Colorado State Mental Institution.