Karla Kelsey is an exciting voice in contemporary poetry. In many ways, her work reads as an extension of the Modernist tradition of feminist writers, who responded through poetic craft to the male philosophers of their particular historical moment. Like H.D.’s poetic revisions of Freud, Marianne Moore’s artistic […]
Mexican tacos in Paris look like thick rolled cigars, if cigars had meat inside. They dance Bachata. Their feet move in confusion. The sirens here remind me of a wretchedness I cannot place, maybe something I heard in a book. European unrest over deboned white fish. In Le […]
Shauna Barbosa’s poems are so gorgeous and provocative as to be startling, like the sun sinking into a dark salt sea is startling, or like a deer rendered deer-less on the shoulder of a highway is startling; they move through the everyday to show us the lilt of […]
In this discussion of Douglas Crase and Emersonian poetics, Kylan Rice considers how poetry can help us “locate the algorithms that have given contour to our present reality, including its environmental, political, military, and economic dimensions.” What does it mean to “think like a planet” on a planet […]
One of the oldest critiques leveled against the poets, or anyone who makes (tous poietikous), is that making is always a making-after, in imitation of the real world. Socrates was afraid of poets because, no matter how skilled a poet is at their mimetic craft, at reproducing the […]
The work of Emily Hunt, with its sonic brilliance grounded by its precise sense of affect, offers a gorgeous reminder that poetry is most itself when it conveys what no other medium could. The gestalt of each poem leaves me astounded. At the level of the line, her […]
I keep shifting the stems around until they face forward and lie flat. The thorns and knobs bump into each other and throw it all off. The worst are the kumquats, which fall to the floor as soon as I add them. It isn’t natural for a thin […]
Strange markings indeed. Rachel Moritz’s “Word Blindness” inscribes a text that is by turns dark and light, organic and precisely articulated. The reader wants to be the “you” addressed in the poem, the addressee seen with such peculiar and intimate intensity: “your face the smallest phoneme.” There’s a […]
my mouth pressed to innocence, my mouth pressed to heaven or none or few, a cold washed ash could a cold choir wash in fire— the palm of my tongue walks through the earth, spills from leaves as could they encase Todd Melicker regularly communes with […]
Download the PDF file . Karla Kelsey is the author of four books, most recently Of Sphere, selected by Carla Harryman and published by Essay Press this past fall. Her book Blood Feather is forthcoming from Tupelo Press. Co-publisher with Aaron McCollough of SplitLevel Texts, a press […]