Jaime Lee Kirtz on Juliana Spahr
Gentle Now, Don’t Add to Heartache I. We come into the world. We come into the world and there it is. The sun is there. The brown of the river leading to the blue and the brown of the ocean is there. Salmon and eels are there moving between the brown and the brown and...
M. K. Sukach on William Stafford
Passing Remark In scenery I like flat country. In life I don’t like much to happen. In personalities I like mild colorless people. And in colors I prefer gray and brown. My wife, a vivid girl from the mountains, says, “Then why did you choose me?” Mildly I lower my brown eyes— there are so...
Yerra Sugarman on Paul Celan
Death Fugue Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night we drink and we drink it we dig a grave in the breezes there one lies unconfined A man lives in the house he plays with the serpents he writes he...
Sarah Burgoyne on Stacy Doris
Doris: the muscular work Time’s a free illusion of right’s triumph, of reward, which cordons, Of justice, meaning boundaries; bound. Where law’s unruly or limitless Respect may be owed perhaps, but at length. Taxing or toxic, continuity’s Sealed in meager endurance. Finite since unbased, having no source. So that if we’s could forget entitlement, I...
Deborah Poe on Megan Burns
to mother as an aid to memory You become a different person than you thought, some intimate animal falling over itself. These bones build a holy sepulcher for blessed days. More doused in the litter of being human, what we think we need to survive as a species seems to supplant survival. Some other earth...
Susannah M. Smith on Walter Benjamin
Peering into Walter Benjamin’s Archive I don’t know you, WB. I don’t know you at all. I’m thinking of the way people seem to hear about you serendipitously, repeatedly. I’m thinking of the leather suitcase that disappeared after you died, its contents alleged but never located: postcards, a manuscript, a pipe, morphine. You are gone...
Will Vallières on Rae Armantrout
Custom We maintain a critical distance from the sad spaniel gentlemen in cravats on the plaid duvet at the Custom Hotel, Los Angeles. We are so over it. We fly from terminal to terminal almost endlessly. We are almost money. We can wait at high speed. In the Rae Armantrout poem “Custom,” language is used...
Chris Hutchinson on Gabe Foreman
Kleptomaniacs As long as you keep an open mind about the thing you seek, it’s always in the first place you look. Gabe Foreman, A Complete Encyclopedia of Different Types of People “The rich have kleptomania, while the poor are taken down with larceny.” Superintendent of a second-hand department store, New York, 1878 (Segrave...
What Are You Working On, Jonathan Ball?
The following excerpts are from Jonathan Ball’s work-in-progress, The Politics of Knives. from “PSYCHO” But mother, we like her. She skins so beautiful, she showers for us clean. from “IN VITRO CITY” in vitro city, protestors are not welcome. the riot police are not welcome. former members of the regime are not welcome. troops are...
Wanda O’Connor on Robin Blaser
The City wept by a pool midway, the lover’s conversation claimed itself like the old head of the wandering Jew painted on leather, the head follows the voice, a fluid that is a body the mirror is to be read the water moved faster than the eye the radio ambles in between the lines of it is a sound, a...
Catherine Owen on Muriel Ruykeyser
Boy with His Hair Cut Short Sunday shuts down on this twentieth-century evening. The L passes. Twilight and bulb define the brown room, the overstuffed plum sofa, the boy, and the girl’s thin hands above his head. A neighbour’s radio sings stocks, news, serenade. He sits at the table, head down, the young clear neck...
