Poetry
-
from In a Landscape
“We’re both happier this way, making these things/ real, because someday we won’t be.” Pulling meaning from contingency, John Gallaher composes a heartbreakingly sweet essay in verse.
-
Anamnesis
“I cover it with a variety/of cloths, on which I like/to watch the material world/settle: leaves, dust,/the wings of flying insects.” G.C. Waldrep tells the story of a man and his machine, harnessing memory, appetite, and imagination.
-
Elegy with Television
Haunted by the sense that there could be “some molten soul inside/the finite ways skin rides the bone and bone/pulls skin across it,” Peter Campion composes a beautiful and intricate elegy led on by appearances.
-
from The Boss
“Who owns the land owns the buildings on the land owns the people in the/buildings unless an earthquake sucks the land in like a long noodle.” A vital new collection from Victoria Chang lines up the forces against us.
-
Short Takes on Long Poems, Volume 4
|
Reginald Gibbons, Darcie Dennigan, Carl Phillips, Jane Hirshfield, Garrett Hongo, Daisy Fried, Debra Allbery, Solmaz Sharif, Devin Johnston, Patrick Rosal, Karla Kelsey, Sebastian Agudelo David Yezzi, and Peter Cooley weigh in (briefly) on their favorite long poems.
-
Short Takes on Long Poems, Volume 3
|
V. Penelope Pelizzon, Michael Collier, Peter Streckfus, Afaa Michael Weaver, Wendy Willis, Ed Skoog, Lia Purpura, Jeff Dolven, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Anna Maria Hong, Katie Peterson, and Catherine Theis weigh in (briefly) on their favorite long poems.
-
Short Takes on Long Poems, Volume 2
|
Marianne Boruch, John Koethe, Jon Davis, Camille Dungy, Cate Marvin, Rachel Hadas, H. L. Hix, Shane McCrae, Nicole Cooley, Gretchen E. Henderson, David Caplan, and Jake Adam York weigh in (briefly) on their favorite long poems.
-
Sleep Mothers
It is two it is three it is four in the morningThey are sleeping think of them sleeping.It is two it is three it is four in the morningAll in their beds think of them, think of them sleepingThe gray-haired mothers are sleepingOut walking, walking home, you are still out walkingLike houses viewed from incoming…
-
Short Takes on Long Poems, Volume 1
|
R. T. Smith, Michael Leong, Dana Levin, Paisley Rekdal, Cecily Parks, John Poch, Daniel Bosch, Spencer Reece, Michael Ryan, Sam Hamill, Erica Dawson, and Robert Pinsky weigh in (briefly) on their favorite long poems.
-
Brother
Writing to a half-brother he didn’t know, Shane McCrae tells a powerful story of longing across race, distance and lies–a story of “water in a fist” where the brothers are “not the fist/…not the water/we the thirst.”
-
Onset
“When thought goes a long way away from the point, apply heat/and observe its tracks.” Taking her own advice, Rusty Morrison traces a mind through illness, noting the ways in which, “Indistinguishable from body’s surface, a net/of symptoms floats.”
-
from Bye-Bye Land
Sampling athletes, politicians and canonical poets (among others), Christian Barter tells the story of 21st-Century America in a poem whose range is matched by its remarkable narrative force.
-
from Labyrinth
“Still the heavy kick drum of the bull-man’s gait shakes the boy’s gut,” writes Oliver de la Paz in this opulent version of an ancient myth. “Still the labyrinth gathers its boundaries in redundant corridors.”
-
Homeric Turns
A masterful poem of suffering, storytelling and gods from Alan Shapiro, in whose hands “the rank and file/Massed for a sleep walk into corpse fires” can become, for a moment, “A figure now for storm clouds out at sea.”
-
Delusion’s Enclosure: on Harry Partch (1901-1974)
“LISTEN TO THAT.” Stephen Motika makes his own original music in writing the life, work and migrations of a composer who once asserted, “tongue must couple with the cavity or there’s no resonant tone. yes, this is sexy.”