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Soft Power
“Your pupils widen on all / Adra prison will swallow. / Wives rock, fingering their beads.” While her husband observes political trials in Syria, V. Penelope Pelizzon wanders “the republic of poetry,” seeking language to account for their encounters there.
The Monongahela Book of Hours
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.”