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Keep Fast Hold of Your Parents
I laid my victim cards before Mary Jane, one by one, like I had a Tarot pack: “See this!” and ”See this!” and “See that!” Just as I got to the part about my mother, some egregious slight of hers I thought worthy of justifiable anger, Mary Jane stopped me. Mid-sentence. “Your job,” she said, “is to leave other people alone.” An excerpt from poet Spencer Reece ‘s memoir, The Little Entrance: Devotions.
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Muscularity and Eros: On Syntax
“Possibly the most disturbing thing about prosody–but about syntax especially, because it involves choice–is its utter fidelity to our innermost–truer?–selves. We sing–and we are betrayed.”Carl Phillips maps the work of syntax through examples from Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Hayden, Tommy Pico, Shakespeare, Hemingway, Sharon Olds, Ed Skoog, Linda Gregg, and francine j. harris.
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If They Come For Us: Fatimah Asghar and Shyama Golden
Fatimah Asghar and Shyama Golden discuss how Shyama created cover art for Fatimah’s debut collection of poetry, If They Come For Us, and more. Including glimpses of Shyama’s drafting process and three other pieces of art.
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Exit Music (For My Sweetheart The Cheater)
“I elbow crawled / through car bombs and bar brawls just to find you. I’m not your limp // Virginia dick…. I’m the woman / swathed in bloodshot, rising up from unclean seas.” A new poem of fierce vengeance and striking vulnerability from Brandi Nicole Martin.
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Robert Calafiore
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Robert Calafiore talks with Debra Klomp Ching about his extraordinary and colorful pinhole photographs.
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Two Responses to Donald Trump
In “My Greco-Russian Investigation, Reginald Gibbons adapts Pindar’s Third Pythian Ode to hold Donald Trump up to history. And with “The Goddess,” Kathleen Ossip moves from Dante’s Paradiso through her own apotheosis as Mommybody, traveling across the U.S. in search of a sustainable vision of the future.
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Two Visual Essays: American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
After Terrance Hayes completed American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, he found he had some remaining fragments and lines that yet “begged … for shape.” From them he has been making drawings.
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Persephone, Engaged
“as they shake / the field around them / withers.” With sharp wit and and in terrible detail, Maya Phillips retells the young goddess’ forced descent into a world where “she’d sooner be kin / of fire. // And so she’ll let herself burn / to steal herself back.”
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Marnay. May 2017
“One of my friends died yesterday, back home. / My newest grandchild will be born next week. // Three Junes ago, the roses were first blooming. / This May, the roses are nearly ending. // But I woke up with the words in my head / seventy years of beauty.” Shifting between poetry and prose, Ann Fisher Wirth sifts a life among others far from home, in a small town in France.
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from OBIT
“The visits lessened and lessened. They were pursuing their own deaths.” Victoria Chang’s obituaries spiral out from the death of her mother into a series of wide-ranging, imaginative, and heart-breaking meditations.
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from The Riddle of Longing
Read excerpts from Faisal Mohyuddin’s new chapbook, as well as an introduction by Dilruba Ahmed.
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The Goodbye Door
Lesley Jenike encounters a painting with an intriguing title—The Goodbye Door by Joan Mitchell—at around the same time that she learns about the discovery of remains of infants and small children near a Catholic Church-run home for mothers and babies born out of wedlock in Tuam, Ireland. In this essay, Jenike meditates on Mitchell, Tuam, her own life, internalized misogyny, resistance, synesthesia, narrative, love, and more.
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Neighborn
“it occupies me,” writes Christina Davis in a brittle and bold new poem of a self among selves, “this errand out of narrowness.” “such as I was / I was eligible.”
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from Little Climates
Read excerpts from L.A. Johnson’s new chapbook, as well as an introduction by Tyler Mills.
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Two Poems
“Who begs for school, in such a / yellow voice? // A mother determined / to set her children free.” Two new poems from Mahtem Shiferraw take on colors, exclusion, and words.