Poetry
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Sing Sing
Tired of prison, a failed muse tries to draft a letter of apology to her parole board. “For the record,” she writes, “I never was a god. I am / spirit same as you, / moving body to body / through the years.” By Tomás Q. Morín.
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Eight Lo-Fis
“I believe in Music, / maker of all that, though / never quite, is as that / which was should have been.” H.L. Hix’s Lo-Fis loop “what does not happen there” and what did not happen here, making much of what’s not quite.
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He Would Always Love Painting More
“Don’t explain. It was an honor // to have been your goat, small / brained and hungry, your wind // advertising all it touched.” A beautiful new poem of art, love, and insufficiency from Jenny Browne.
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Familiar Stranger
“Sliced in half, / I hold this rolling sound, / this heart shaking off / its hinges,” Jane Wong writes, shuffling, arranging, seeking connections. “The small heat of my arm nestles / in among the pines.”
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Natural History
“We are in a great dying,” Robin Beth Schaer writes to her infant son, pulled by love for him into the the history of a world in decline. “Intricacies / of milk and sleep dismantle me. I empty / myself into you, hollowing by the ounce. // There are seven white rhinos when you are born. / A year later, six.”
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Two Movies
“look at what the lord has made. / above Missouri, sweet smoke.” Danez Smith scripts heartbreaking films of racism, violence, anger, grief, endurance, and love, concluding, “I believe when a person dies / the black lives on.”
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Shooting the Skulls: Devotionals
“No skull stays silent. Each spills its neglects.” In a brilliant new sequence of sonnets, Paisley Rekdal tries, in a time of war, to find voices for the abandoned skulls unearthed on the grounds of the Colorado State Mental Institution.
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Light
“What did her eyes that gleamed with the glow of extinguished silver see as she was peering into the afterlife?” In this translation from Fady Joudah, Amjad Nasser turns his dying mother’s prayer for him–“May God light your way”–into a meditation on the nature of light itself, wondering all the while, “Is remembering my mother a pretext to write about Noor/Dao, or is writing about them a pretext to remember my mother?”
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Telephone Project #2
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A. Van Jordan, Allison Benis White, Andre Hulet, Aracelis Girmay, David Caplan, David Yezzi, Ed Skoog, Erika Meitner, Ernest Hilbert, Gerald Maa, H. L. Hix, J. P. Dancing Bear, Jason Schneiderman, Jennifer Chang, Jennifer Kronovet, Jenny Browne, Joanne Diaz, John Murillo, Kathryn Stripling Byer, Kazim Ali, Kimiko Hahn, Kristina Jipson, Marilyn Nelson, Meena Alexander, Paula Bohince, Roger Sedarat, Ross Gay, Ross White, Tara BettsA conversation in poems, featuring original work from Kimiko Hahn, Aracelis Girmay, John Murillo, Roger Sedarat, Jason Schneiderman, Jennifer Kronovet, Ross Gay, H. L. Hix, A. Van Jordan, Marilyn Nelson, Allison Benis White, Kathryn Stripling Byer, J. P. Dancing Bear, Meena Alexander, Paula Bohince, Tara Betts, Kristina Jipson, Ernest Hilbert, David Yezzi, Joanne Diaz, Kazim Ali, Ed Skoog, Erika Meitner, David Caplan, Jennifer Chang, Andre Hulet, Gerald Maa, Jenny Browne, and Ross White.
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Scavenger Loop
“Who would I show it so unprocessed to—” David Baker rummages through dozens of texts, finding words for his mother’s death in an America of endless manufacture, modification and forestalled decay.
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Antiphon
“It occupies me: this errand out of narrowness.” Christina Davis’s slender lines send the self out in search of the world, “Thru self to arrive / at selves and thru selves / the self again—”
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Until The Beast Was Slain
“repurposed rubble erect / for these dirt counties’ / mad whelps reluctantly / the pity funds trickle.” Adam Tavel reconstructs the horrors of the Wicomico County Almshouse, twice obscured.
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The Night Grove
“The torturer wants to know how one minute blood, one minute / snow. ” In a room where “fictive or lesser / realities kept entering,” Kerri Webster encircles the ghosts of violence, tenderness, and fear.
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from To Banquet with the Ethiopians
“He’d never seen the Iliad.” Irreverent and imaginative, Philip Brady sings of Homer’s first encounter with the alphabet.