Poetry
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from None Other
In the first section of a vital new book, Allan Peterson writes of the natural world: “There is no other/To explain where it came from is speculation like reading/water from a faucet. Beyond what we think/in our dreams or ideas it is still there/even the island of walruses.”
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Amistad
Elizabeth Alexander recounts a key moment from the history of slavery in a sequence whose variety and force ask what it means to live with a brutal legacy in which “Many things are true at once.”
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Defect
In a sequence of prose poems about the young man who defected from the Soviet bloc and came to live with her childhood family, Jessica Fisher reflects on the ways political landscapes map themselves onto individual lives.
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The Blue Word
Laura Christina Dunn summons memories of a beached whale and a lost love, wondering how much of how we live can be sustained.
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selections from Holding Company
In an excerpt from his forthcoming book, Major Jackson uses a repeating form to make room for a roster of desires, as well as the craft they foster and fill.
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The Residue of God & After the Waiting Room
In two new poems, Kimiko Hahn talks to one of Elizabeth Bishop’s best-known works and traces a history of beauty, investigation, authority and error reaching to the present.
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Dark Adaptation: Milan, 1510-11
Da Vinci’s sketches of his stillborn child, still in utero, frame an expectant father’s thoughts on the desire for knowledge and the persistent expectation that something closer to the center remains to be seen. By David Hawkins.
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Owl Wolf Ghost
A host of creatures stalks the outer reaches of intimacy as Paula Bohince conjures human and inhuman, natural and supernatural wills.
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Layoff
Craig Morgan Teicher responds to a lost job with a wide-ranging meditation on money, family, poetry, and responsibility, as well as the relationships that threaten to slip through the cracks.
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In the Red Dress I Wear to Your Funeral
A spurned lover turns her grief into a virtuoso performance of vengeance, wit, and affection, aspiring to the moment when she can “step away free.” By Erin Belieu.
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from Effacement
In an excerpt from her next book, Elizabeth Arnold weaves together medicine, history, and literature to evoke a body that is in and of the world.
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Limbs Move Wind In
Kristina Jipson shifts perspectives through a series of overlapping poems that excavate rooms and reach into reflections.
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from Critical Assembly
John Canaday tells the story of the world’s first nuclear weapons in the voices of the men and women who conceived them.
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Bula Matari/ Smasher of Rocks
Tom Sleigh combines stagecraft, Conrad, family, nukes, colonialism, mythology, and more in a poem both intensely personal and astonishingly vast.
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from A Night-Blue Stumble Of Gaslight
The adventures of L. M. Fish stretch across nearly a half-century of American history in a sequence that Tom Sleigh has praised as “an uncommonly intelligent, passionate, and tactile event.” By M. Reed Corey