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Irma
“When I say ‘te amo,’ I bend a border to you.” Shifting from word to image, language to language, scene to scene, Paul Hlava Ceballos assembles a portrait of his mother from contested memories, amid ongoing erasure, and in honor of her lifelong work of making a life for them.
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Nonnus of Panopolis’s Dionysiaca: Book 7
From a new translation of the longest surviving poem from Ancient Greece, the story of how Eternity pleaded with Zeus to create wine to ease human suffering, as well as the courtship of Zeus and the human Semele, which led to Dionysus’ conception. Translated by Christian Teresi.
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Wrong
“It’s not just you who has it wrong./It’s not just people. It’s every song.” Out of empire, war, destruction, and some smaller mistakes, Thomas Mixon feverishly tries to fantasize a better vision of America and, maybe, but probably not, himself.
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Four Poems on Sally, Dick, and Jane
“Sometimes Dad naps on the sofa. / Pray is like play is like sleep. / I want to play, but I am on the outside. / This is how I learn to pray.” H.E. Fisher tells the story of a childhood in primers.
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Abyssal
“From your flesh I’d grow a garden, / I’d make a forest of your bones.” A new poem from Carolyn Oliver overlays the long echoes of Hamlet, whale-fall, the death of a beloved, and the future of a son.
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The Cats of Old San Juan
“The cats are here because of the rats. / The rats are here because of the Americans. / The Americans were here because of the Spanish. / The Spanish were here because fuck the Spanish.” Combining the force of logic with bitter irony and sharp humor, a new poem from David M. de León tracks the confusions of Puerto Rico’s colonial past and present.
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Three Dramatic Monologues
Three new poems from Matthew Buckley Smith present a medieval mother reckoning with forebodings of a new plague; Achilles, in an alternate history, looking back on a life in which he never went to war; and a contemporary woman refashioning her public humiliation.
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Cicada Meditation
“the most isolated / simply settled anywhere, everywhere / else, making grass blades into cat tails, / sifting into the henhouse / like aliens hatched out of the blond / nesting boxes, / and infesting the feed, live mines. / They passed through our farm cats / almost whole.” A new poem from Chad Parmenter reckons with a legacy of fear and violence and alienation and faith that makes the past “less / a place…
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Two Poems
“My mother was thinking of dying. I am thinking / of me as a kid in my room, listening late / to my mother pound down the stairs / in her nightgown again to my sister screaming / in terror again, terrified, my mother says, / of time.” In “The Jumblies” and “The One-Armed Man,” Daisy Fried confronts love, grief, parenting, war, and the intricate ongoingness of life.
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My Boyfriend, John Keats
“You whisper to the statuettes / ‘Fill all fruit to ripeness’ / They won’t answer you, darling.” In a new poem from Camille Guthrie, an attempted courtship of John Keats turns into a romp through modern conveniences, Romantic poetry, and the indignities of love.
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Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop: Notes on Pattern and Variation
Looking at examples from Ross Gay, William Carlos Williams, C.K. Williams, Lucille Clifton, Thom Gunn, James Baldwin, and more, Alan Shapiro tracks the patterns and changes within poems and across time that make it possible for poems to “meet the needs of ever-changing individuals in an ever-changing language, and an ever-changing world.”
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The Union Forever
“We fed / each other fats in manifold forms. / Starlings lifted. This place, / we said, for the life of us—” In an intricate new poem of switchbacks and overlaps from Christopher Kempf, a marriage begins in Gettysburg, PA as America’s violent history erupts.
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The Reformation
“The robot bird flew down // From the ceiling landed on / My head bent its head down / And whispered in my ear / Wake up you fucker.” A new installment in Shane McCrae’s thrilling, terrifying, madcap, and marvelous “The Hell Poem.”
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Two Poems
“Nothing makes it out of history. / Not without becoming history.” In “Ossa Leonis” and “Implements,” David M. de León braids colonial history with personal exploration, and vice versa.
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Notes Toward An Elegy
“She buys herself / greeting cards, Valentine’s, St. Patrick’s, Thanksgiving, / and signs them From your cold-hearted daughter. / Bundled for me to find when I come home.” A new sequence from Julia Thacker reaches for moments and images that add up to a life.