Elegy for the Routine
“His voice unzips / the few words he has formed // for this purpose, what he says / of coming apart.” The insidious dementia of a father fractures, assembles, retrieves, and unties in a new poem from Lauren Camp.
An Arsenal of Sand
“Anger in our family was like the water: it had to go somewhere. Rise up, sink down, or burst everywhere at once.” An excerpt from Angela Palm‘s Riverine: A Memoir from Anywhere but Here.
There Was and How Much There Was
“The walls don’t have ears here. / Everybody is a woman here.” Zeina Hashem Beck weaves the conversations of women at a party into a world of song.
Gest
“When time breaks you can feel it in your body at noon when half the day is done and again at 3 pm when you are going home.” Page Hill Starzinger’s poem of her parents’ decline tries to restore the house they can no longer keep. “No, my father said, don’t do that, it’s not a good house.”
Seismodiptych: Skyline Aftermath
“A creak / A creaking / Your earth / Split and splayed” A crown of new poems from Ruth Ellen Kocher loops through outsets and aftermaths.
Selections from Rave
“Gramercy, that you sang in clicks to say / That all the world is stirring / And alive.” Six new songs of praise from Marly Youmans gather brilliance from the likes of dragonflies, sorrow, and marbles.
Poetry Ha Ha
“Theories of comedy are no more comic in themselves than theories of sexuality are sexy.” Robert Archambeau digs into ideas of comedy and the poetry of Aaron Belz.
My Name Is A Saving Aphasia: Or, the Biography of Questions
“What’s the word for…?” Philip Metres tells a life story in looking for words.
Migraine Season
“Something terrible has to happen. I tell my student to complete the sentence: This is a problem because….” Victoria Kornick‘s long poem in prose meditates on power, art, men talking to women, men abusing women, and trying to tell all the truth.
Transference
Playful, inventive and profoundly sad, this verse drama from Craig Morgan Teicher pits an 18-year-old Craig and his psychotherapist against each other and against his mother’s death.
Takuji Hamanaka
Talking with artist and printmaker Takuji Hamanaka about his hybrid woodcut and collage works: radical displacements from his training in traditional Japanese woodblock printmaking.
from Barbie Chang
“Barbie Chang’s mother made her / wear two pair of // underwear no wonder she is weird.” In an excerpt from her latest sequence, Victoria Chang turns not fitting in into both a distressing image of American life and an occasion for linguistic delight.
from The New York Editions
“Is this how it feels to be put to use?” Writing under the star of Henry James, Michael D. Snediker summons words for what was out of reach. “Impossible to think about without tempting the disaster already invited by trying not not to to think of them.”
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.
Ghost in the Graveyard
“I put the shovel into the ground, stepped down, and turned the earth loose like he had shown me.” Dating an outdoorsy type gets strange in a short story by Tayler Heuston.