Adam Sol on David B. Goldstein: Laws of Rest
LAWS OF REST Examine your clothing before going out, for you may be carrying something without knowing it. Do not place a wick into a bowl of oil, for then the oil will be drawn up and you will promote burning. Do not light with cedar bast or uncombed flax. Are you Nahum the Mede? So...
Christine Miscione on John Berryman: The Dream Songs
DREAM SONG 4 Filling her compact & delicious body with chicken páprika, she glanced at me twice. Fainting with interest, I hungered back and only the fact of her husband & four other people kept me from springing on her or falling at her little feet and crying ‘You are the hottest one for years...
J’Lyn Chapman on Wallace Stevens
WAVING ADIEU, ADIEU, ADIEU That would be waving and that would be crying, Crying and shouting and meaning farewell, Farewell in the eyes and farewell at the centre, Just to stand still without moving a hand. In a world without heaven to follow, the stops Would be endings, more poignant than partings, profounder, And that...
Elisa Gabbert on Karen Green’s Bough Down
Bough Down, Karen Green. Siglio, 2013. by Elisa Gabbert In comedy, a “callback” is a joke that makes reference to an earlier joke, to “build audience rapport.” In Bough Down, a hybrid collection you might call prose poetry, lyric essay, or memoir in verse, writer/artist Karen Green employs a constant calling back not for comic effect,...
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...
Elisa Gabbert, The Poneme: Farrah Field’s Dioramas
There are states of heightened awareness in which the smallest stimulus can set you off—when nervous or frightened, when being tickled, during laughing fits. Farrah Field’s poems create worlds this taut, trembling with tension; reading them, you enter such a state, you are inclined to hold your breath. Field’s second book, Wolf and Pilot (Four...
Michael Redhill on W.S. Merwin
GATE BY W.S. MERWIN Once I came back to the leaves just as they were falling into the rattling of magpies and the waving flights through treetops beyond the long field tawny with stubble a scatter of sheep wandered there circling slowly as a galaxy ferrying the grey lights that were theirs wading into their...
Ken Babstock on John Degen
HOW POEMS WORK KEN BABSTOCK Reluctance BY JOHN DEGEN from the air, the city cloaks itself in nature, patchy, black-green forests and empty roads beyond the runway fence, the blood-brown metal capsules of abandoned turbo-props; curious long-limbed dogs watch us from a fuselage, bowing noses to their feet, eyes shifting to each other and back...
