Poetry
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from Shadow-feast
“You were right. I couldn’t climb / the stairs. Breath was all I wore / and what bolted my body together, / poor meat, was a small will—smaller than me.” Exquisite new poems of dying and grief from Joan Houlihan.
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Two Poems
“What are you going to do?” asks Camille Guthrie, wandering the history of art. “You hold her tremulous hand and wipe her brow / Stay up reading to her when she can’t sleep for the pain / To ease her tempestuous heart.”
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Two Poems
“Imagine / a day alone / and call it Love.” New poems from Jayme Ringleb try to rename sadness. “because / you wanted to believe this was good, // you kept from yelling against this man / who wanted to gather you, to remake you / into what may have been worth a man.”
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from The Household Gods
“For all things have been created unfinished, and the smith must skim away the dross. The outcast god, the cuckolded god. In whose image this is made.” Old tales take on new voice in these poems from Dave Lucas.
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from Then Winter
Read a selection of poems from Chloe Honum’s new chapbook, the latest in our series of samplers from Durham chapbook publishers.
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The Poem That Won’t Leave You Alone
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Chad Parmenter, Sumita Chakraborty, Roger Sedarat, Alexandra Socarides, Katy Didden, Matthew Cooperman, Alfred Corn, Jennifer Perrine, V. Penelope Pelizzon, and Victoria Chang on poems that will not go away.
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from Drapetomania
Read a selection of poems from Cynthia Parker-Ohene’s new chapbook, the first in a series of samplers from Durham chapbook publishers.
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Callimachus in Sicily
“the thing / that baffles travelers in Zanton / is that nobody who lives there is allowed / …to tell the whole story of how it came to be.” In Stephen Burt’s poem, Callimachus tells the story of a town whose citizens will never “name / the founders of the town, / who kept it safe through subterfuge and shame.”
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Two Poems
“I am an ugly boy but it’s a pretty / day everywhere hard blue snow and old / men arguing.” Two new poems from Kaveh Akbar careen toward beauty, salvation, and self-destruction.
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Attitudes at the New Year
“Pieces of righteousness look like a river of baroque pearls with mean, red, pre-digital eyes. ” Kathleen Ossip looks ahead and gathers her “ragged power,” trying for some way to do better this time.
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from island of no birdsong
“i want to believe / in the resurrection / of the body because / i have no memories / of birdsong.” In a new poem from Craig Santos Perez, documentary and lyric overlap in the destruction of both avian life and human culture on Guam.
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The Devouring
“[H}e has outlived // everything but the taste / of his sons’ hair when gently / he kisses them incessantly // at the altar of their sleep.” In a new poem from Adam Tavel, Goya’s savage image of Saturn inhales decades of violence.
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Four Poems
“I must learn / the language of rain / to speak to plants.” A handful of new poems from Tyree Daye summon the dead and the living, family and prayer. “If there is something perfect in life,” he writes, “let it come now.”
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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.
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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.