Elsbeth Pancrazi’s first book, Full Body Pleasure Suit, creates a defamiliarizing near-future (or current?) dystopic paradise through which she and the reader might explore, as she says, “how to connect, be present, and be sensual in a virtual world I started to imagine as a possible future.” It’s a […]
The mind in night spreads out like fireflies – impatient lilting over flooding water, nowhere to land now that they can see, each makes me still look back. Who reached? – I wanted to be the fateless cave where someone, you, could lose the world, slip down its […]
Garnett Kilberg Cohen’s “Space and Time, the Four Dimensions” is a warm, compelling meditation on our passage through that brief historical moment we call “our” time. I appreciate the way Cohen shapes a dramatic narrative that is simultaneously linear and associative. Each moment unfolds as if it could move […]
Download the PDF file . Jessica Garratt is the author of Fire Pond, winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry and published by the University of Utah Press. She lives in Maryland with her husband and daughter.
Who is not callous, not cattle moving in sequence, a cataract of time, of blue-grained lusciousness a green scythe illumined in moon – who is not night corkscrewed, not chrysalis tearing into what we will call heavy in an eye. Who is not moon moving in sequence clobbered […]
It’s no work at all to destroy the past once the thing is in motion In the succession of handsomely carved valleys many pieces of equipment used in mining can be seen rusting in peace Some sites of famous and important killings are camps for recreational rafters now […]
Death taps his black wand and something vanishes: winter tongue of the dear, the dead; tongue of death that said “sorrow” for fear that in the future all the beauties of the world would cry aloud: whom should I search for? The answer? my mother. Bones undressing a […]
From a manuscript titled Threnody Fury & Psalms, the three pieces available here are haunting distillations of sorrow that engage the ancient poetic form of the cento (conceived as early as the 4th century if not earlier), as well as other collage arrangements, to establish a penetrating and contemporary collective […]
Nonfiction writer John McPhee devises a graphic symbol to represent the structure of every piece he writes — a doodle with arrows, a nautilus set against the axes of time and place. When I read Aaron Coleman’s poems, I want to draw their forms: intricate, precise, relentless, necessary. […]
He dreams the sun leaves earth energy poor like a moon with no leaves like a fire with the soul of a dead bluefish Vibrations refuse to activate the bell It has no tongue because he was its tongue He’s busy dreaming the soft dark night the silent […]