SPLIT SECONDS: THE LANDSCAPE PAINTINGS OF MICHAEL GOODWIN a micro-interview with Elaine Sexton ELAINE SEXTON: These landscapes have great presence. You seem to have stilled something fleeting, like memory, a moment in which the clouds in the sky looked spectacular or the light shaded the trees on a given day, something forgotten until […]
How do we code trapped in the light— little spider in amber, extra in the camera flash. I mean, I can’t ungloss myself. Stuck, shining, the too-much of attention: bunny or doe, as in Jane, as in died of exposure, as in but where was she putting herself. […]
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 […]
Jane Wong‘s poems can be found in Best American Poetry 2015, American Poetry Review, AGNI, Poetry, and others. A Kundiman fellow, she is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the U.S. Fulbright Program, the Fine Arts Work Center, Hedgebrook, and Bread Loaf. She is the author of Overpour (Action Books, 2016) and […]
To the fourteen autonomous regions of my body hairs, welcome. Toes—good evening, are you blue? If the branch of the crape myrtle split you lengthwise, femur, would you thank it? You there, solar plexus, do you wince? Do you really see yourselves like two anti-naval mines long forgotten […]
I’m driving to preschool in the fog, scrubbing the cast iron again, char under my nails, and hear it whispering, how easily I shift into the fitful shapes of duty, how the tinny bell of need rings and I fold, preen, wipe, kneel. It’s not unlike love this […]
When they lift the baby to my chest, his skin’s still slick with clots of vernix. The soft plates of his skull are compressed into a cone, and his dark hair is damp with amniotic fluid. I inhale the unwashed funk and watch as this tiny naked mammal […]
A star – sweetest beauty. Denied faith or body, it doesn’t know touch, doesn’t know patience. Born of luminous solitude, its numb sex impregnates nocturnal women in their madness, rips away their silence and rust, moistens their nipples with the wings of its tongue, fractures their insomnia, discolors their bellies, […]
Ah how morbid you move cougar contending to cross the garden cage where you have locked yourself in between cold mirrors to keep from leaving, […]
A Process Note These crossword poems are from a hybrid manuscript-in-process, The Stork Rides Shotgun: statistically significant poems. I created the form of the crossword poem™ during a December 2018 residency at Caldera. My goals were three-fold: 1) to redesign lyric ways of knowing the world with the user’s [non-poet’s] […]
