Poetry
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The Monongahela Book of Hours
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V. Penelope Pelizzon strings her time in a mining town together with stories of an early coal baron, the workers who opposed him, and the art in the museum that bears his name, hunting “Illuminations sharp/enough to catch…/dark earth’s plunge/to underworlds where men still crouch to free/the stone whose flesh is flame.”
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Two Prose Pieces
In one of the two prose poems here, Rachel Zucker deals with a friend’s death, her unreliable memory and her fascination with another poet known only as “one.” In the other, Elaine Bleakney begins, “This is the beginning of talking to you: deer in the yard,” setting off a series of meditations that cover a terrible job, a traumatic labor, and culture shock.
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from The Book of the Red King
Marly Youmans’ chronicle of a fool in search of his king is a rollicking tour through the traditions of English literature and the pleasures of the language itself. Introducing her hero she writes, “He shakes his rattle at the dark/And fills his antic hat with leaves.”
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Where His Lines Run
Starting from a six-sentence obituary that ran in 1855, Adam Tavel crafts a riveting sequence of letters and monologues invoking suicide, infidelity, race, and the “bent trumpet of grief” that echoes over generations.
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Six Poems from Five Poets
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.
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Bay
“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.”
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from Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels
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.
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Atomic Clock
“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.”
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A Lover’s Recourse
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.”
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Three Poems
“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.
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Black Sun Crown
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.”
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from None Other
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.”
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Amistad
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.”
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Defect
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.
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The Blue Word
Laura Christina Dunn summons memories of a beached whale and a lost love, wondering how much of how we live can be sustained.