"If the moon smiled, she would resemble you. / You leave the same impression / Of something beautiful, but annihilating.”
It’s no big secret that artists and art critics have coopted the word “poetic” to describe art. But just what does the word mean to non-poets?
Conor Bracken reviews recent books by Sam Sax, Frank Ormsby, William Logan, Michael Longley, and Cameron Barnett.
Mud might be a sinking feeling, a series of words used to cause pain, a confusion about relationships, or something to build from, it might be the evidence of something past, or the life source of …
After that, it’s pretty simple biology; / pelvis, hips, and shoulders. Everything / just falls apart.
Among the gnarled trees on the slope, / along the way to an old spar mine, / somebody has dropped a telescope.
Once you asked someone to hide the bottle, / and once you didn’t. Once it rained / on your rain.
they are still / sinking they are damned to fall / forever through its deepening
We improvise a language that disturbs them the least, like palms of hands that touch them weightlessly, even when they’re having a fit.
The lawn breeds black spikes in the oppressive geometric / shadow of the helicopter. This is how they grew the nails / for the crucifixion.
"Lynn, Lynn, the city of sin, / If you ain’t bad they just won’t let you in / Oh, Lynn, Lynn, the city of sin, / The damnedest place you will ever live in"
To say I love you put a bird on a wire / so I told her enough times to get an abacus / going in the sky.
The apex vent of a parachute, it turns out, fits right around a pecan trunk.
One bite / No chewing / Eager as a Shop-Vac
We’re outside / but that doesn’t mean we’ll not dissolve / if raised to the light.
You, pacing her / tower’s garden, trample / the heads of poppies.
Don’t admire my beauty, don’t seduce me / The burnt wings of a moth can’t brighten
Becoming seventeen years of age meant my daughter would be going out to the island that October. I didn’t want her to go. To me she appeared complete as she was. Also I had hoped, selfishly, that …
They say everyone / wants to be an artist. Not me. / I want to be debonair.
Bad things were happening, he had started to think, more than usual.
I have made of myself a rabbit. / I can no longer speak. Language / is only the click click click of my heart / ticking faster now.
My peeling lips / are a sign; how much skin must a person lose through / the years in order to say that this / is a more complete version than those that precede it?
A chirp, natural / or mechanical: / not clear.
I listen to the moon but it doesn’t say much about my life.
My feet were wading earth and / rotted branches. Limbs the size of a human thigh / and twigs that could fit a small child / hand.
You can take a slap, starfish red, red as his boot treads / clogged with Virginia clay.
It was hot that summer, record highs through June, and Fiona, six, had taken to wearing the same pink and purple two-piece swimsuit every day so that she could spend as much time in the water as …
It is a quiet, banal word. Not one that I have ever thought twice about. Still, one afternoon in July 1983, when Colombo was burning, they say they heard the word cried out a thousand times, flung …
Lani Yu reviews a book of poetry by Dara Wier.
Christian Bancroft reviews four new releases from the revered independent publishing house.
Kraus traces Acker’s life mostly through her private correspondence and keen readings of her works. What is revealed is a writer who bucked conventions, favoring a singular path and a relentless …
She put everyone on speakerphone because she couldn’t bear to have the voicemails that near her brain, where they might absorb and make her believe things from a person who disappeared like setting …
But what choice did I have? Brandon and his colleagues had done all they could do; Ketamine was a last resort.
A roundtable moderated by Adrienne Perry, featuring Ji yoon Lee, Stalina Villareal, Madhu Kaza, Yvette Siegert, & Poupeh Missaghi.
In an elevator there’s not much to do except be alive around each other. Most just look at their shoes, or their phones (we’d ditched ours for fear of tracking), or those glowing buttons.
Let us say I slept as a snake, / camouflaged / a black stone among black stones.
There's you and your lover and there's also his idea / of who you are in this moment, and your idea of who / he should be, both of these like both of you but better— / poreless skin, flushed lips, …
Both [Adeyemi and paggett] are invested in thinking with and about movement as a method of doing, thinking, and being/becoming black queerness.
I have said this already, many times, over and over again, I have said, “I am doing a kind of writing that keeps ending in drawings,” and lowered my voice and scratched my head in a pantomime of …
The passage is smooth, but disorienting. She misses whole parts without knowing. She can’t tell what’s stitched together and what’s whole.
stingray, embrace me. breathe on, stingray. / your burning, your firing draws streaks / across my chest, ah, how it creaks.
Creation is more than what comes from coitus, fertilization,and gametes. Color and shape have survived in the Cave of Altamira despite nature’s storms. Books never fade away. Michelangelo’s …
I wondered if this was something I could say to the other girls at the pool, who had decided that morning that I had a moustache, that my moustache needed a name, and that that name should be Pedro.
