Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet, Jimmmy Santiago Baca, Erica Dawson, Patrick Donnelly, and Thom Satterlee cover parenthood, addiction, sex, love, and more in At Length‘s first-ever poetry issue.
Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet, Jimmmy Santiago Baca, Erica Dawson, Patrick Donnelly, and Thom Satterlee cover parenthood, addiction, sex, love, and more in At Length‘s first-ever poetry issue.
“Easement to/estuaries,” begins Michael D. Snediker, searching for persuasive images of relief in river clay and stoneware, bottles, stars and Cygnus, who “Found/no body//but felt—//again and/again—//the body’s warmth.”
Kevin Young recreates the letters and speeches of the Amistad rebels, probing their relationship to a white culture that both enslaved and liberated them. An excerpt from Young’s brilliant new book, which was 20 years in the making.
“We fail and fail and grow desirous of believing we’re all vehicle, every wet atom of us.” Kerri Webster‘s prose poem draws on place and prayer, fit and ache, showing how the world “lends the appearance of appearing like something else.”
In this breathtaking sequence of ghazals, Jee Leong Koh explores the infinite variety of love: “Take heart and sing of love’s recourse: the river/is running from the river and still is the river.”
“The end of love will be what we become” writes Rachel Hadas, reflecting on the pending loss of a husband and her need to speak as dementia begins to silence him.
Brian Teare enacts the haunted logic of dreams in an inventive and arresting new sequence, tracing a state in which it’s possible to “lie down in/the river where my mind meets the sea.”
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.”
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.”
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.