Reading and re-reading, for the pleasure of its form, “Birth of a Nation” has left me astounded. With its documentary poetics worked into the ground of the poem rather than dominating the frame, and with its precise juxtapositions and anecdotal tone, “Birth of a Nation” foregrounds not the new […]
David Winter’s attention to the physicality of objects and language carries an immediate and arresting gravity. “W. W. II GERMAN S.S. DIVISION SOUP SPOON, $250.00” is, in his own words, “part of a larger body of work-in-progress responding to Nazi and Ku Klux Klan artifacts displayed for sale by […]
A pregnant capuchin monkey struck with a blow dart faints, is lifted by two primatologists into a wire cage and shipped to the other side of the globe where lavender mood lighting frames someone’s son on the subway platform spinning-spinning. His mother used to say he was practicing to […]
Hannah Brooks-Motl is the author of the poetry collections The New Years, M, and Earth, forthcoming in 2019 from the Song Cave. She lives in western Massachusetts.
In “Capitol” Hannah Brooks-Motl turns the conventions of the pastoral inside out, as if the poem’s gravity were being warped by the black hole of late capitalism. I am drawn to the poem’s tender regard for all things—from “yellow mint” to “children / in apparatuses”—caught in its gravitational pull. […]
The film itself wasn’t burning, although now that you mention it, this is perhaps the way to understand the ending. I was early for a train and re-organizing my many bags and then all of a sudden I was late and there were too many contents for the suitcases […]
The phrase “Our girl as nowhere as she can be” becomes the radial of Erica Wright’s poem presented here, which was written in memory of the incandescent Lucie Brock-Broido. Operating in the elegiac tradition, Wright is a conveyer of insight and surprise. Her staircase couplets allow for the unexpected […]
Noah Falck is the author of You Are In Nearly Every Future (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2017) and Exclusions (forthcoming from Tupelo Press, 2020). He lives in Buffalo, NY, where he works as Education Director at Just Buffalo Literary Center. Find him online at noahfalck.org.
Ringing the brownstone bell twice, late arrival, a track fire on the 6 created when trash ignited in the dark, combustion flickering across the eyes of rats. Late, so late, would it not have been better to turn around instead of disrupting the bridal shower, the bride-to-be & co. […]
Noah Falck is a singular voice in contemporary American poetry. In a literary landscape filled with autobiographical writing, he offers an imaginative topography in which the self is made strange, with the memory of what once was familiar still lingering in the background. “Endlessly scrolling your way through an […]