Poetry
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Hydrology of California
Brenda Hillman’s tour of California’s rivers invokes the future of poetry; addresses the likes of Wallace Stevens, Joni Mitchell and “crazy brenda”; and leads to a prayer that borrows from present joys.
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Sorting &Wonder of Birds
Two linked poems from Joanna Klink rummage through a failed relationship, struggling with the challenge of compassion, the violence of the outside world, and the wish to anchor both in something true.
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An Immigrant Woman
An engine of New York City’s growth becomes a terrifying example of its failures in Anne Winters’s intricate and harrowing account.
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The Begotten
James McMichael builds to an uncanny version of the Irish potato famine, invoking the forces of appetite, increase, and distant authority.
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Tantalus in Love
Alan Shapiro weaves Greek myth into a dramatic rendering of a marriage’s last moments and its tendency to reanimate itself every time it seems beyond hope.
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Being Serious
Christian Wiman tells the life story of a man named Serious with unerring wit and mounting poignancy.