I always try to be on the lookout for moments of sudden attention in my life, like the one Sierra Golden describes so vividly in “Winter Heat.” Like her, I believe this is how a poem happens: some sound or image observed in stillness shifts something inside us, and we do our best to find the language to capture that unexpected change in perception.
Our culture, and the people in our lives who don’t always understand depression, can often imply that it is a made-up or fleeting thing—“a wraith or a demon.” Yet Diana Whitney’s moving and precise poem tells the truth about the psychological and emotional weight of something that bears down on us like a “huge container ship,” blocking all movement.
It can be useful and centering to meditate on the sounds that begin our days, becoming attuned to certain birdsongs or noises of the human-made world. In this poem, Alberto Ríos employs a playfulness with language to convey what calls down and brings the morning for him.
100 Word Book Review: Book from the Ground by Xu Bing. In the 1920s, a group of scholars in Vienna tried devising a universal picture language called isotype. Today, Shigetaka Kurita has perhaps achieved that vision with emojis. And in 2012 Xu Bing wrote a book without words from emojis and other contemporary symbols.
"FLITTER / is what she said but what she meant had nothing / to do with the lighting from one bloom to the next / by a monarch or an equally colorful diva at the bar. / What she meant was your privates, your girlie parts, /something you better soap up daily and watch / like a spectacled hawk."
I have breathed into too many balloons / put my fingers in so many cakes / had my body scanned with fingerprints / written out my dreams in lines of the night / traced words into storm clouds / mixed water with mint and bourbon...
For Proust," Susan Howe writes in her Preface to The Gorgeous Nothings, "a fragment is a morsel of time in its pure state; it hovers between a present that is immediate and a past that once had been present." The fragments Howe is specifically referring to are the envelopes left [...]
Lauren Camp (Photo by Elena E. Giorgi) The Dailiness by Lauren Camp from Edwin E. Smith, 2013 An Interview with Lauren Camp Michelle Aldredge: I like the close attention you pay to daily encounters in your book. The image of "folding" appears again and again throughout the collection. [...]
Jamaal May was born in 1982 in Detroit where he has taught poetry in public schools and worked as a freelance audio engineer and touring performer. His first book, Hum, received the Beatrice Hawley Award from Alice James Books and an NAACP Image Award nomination. (Photo by Tarfia Faizullah) [...]
Brenda Arrieta Killian in the wig she wore after shaving her hair at the beginning of chemotherapy. Brenda was the subject of a series of articles Sunday Poet Don Colburn wrote for The Oregonian and is the subject of his new chapbook Tomorrow Too: The Brenda Monologues. (Photo by Stephanie Yao [...]
Lauren Alleyne hails from the twin-island nation of Trinidad and Tobago. (Photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths) Poetry is like ice-cream," poet Lauren Alleyne recently told an interviewer when asked to compare poetry to a food. "It completes joy, but is also a natural remedy for heartache. You can enjoy [...]
Poet C.D. Wright (Photo by W.T. Pfefferle via Flickr Commons) I first encountered C.D. Wright's poetry through the back door of photography. Years ago, when I was studying contemporary artists working with 19th century photographic processes, I stumbled across Deborah Luster's collaboration with C.D. Wright, titled One Big [...]
Do not encourage small children / to play the trombone as the shortness / of their arms may prove quite frustrating, / imprinting a lifelong aversion to music / although in rare cases a sense of unreachability / may inspire operas of delicate auras.
Patricia Fargnoli published her first book of poetry at the age of 62. When Pulitzer-Prize-winner Mary Oliver chose Patricia Fargnoli's first book, Necessary Light, as the winner of The May Swenson Book Award, Fargnoli was 62 years old. "I began writing poems in high school and had a few [...]
As an ex-librarian and book collector, one of my favorite things to do is to ferret out new publications and share them with readers. Whenever I'm traveling, I scour local bookstores and museum shops for interesting books. (Carting heavy art tomes home on an airplane is a familiar [...]
(Attributed to) Caravaggio, Sacrifice of Isaac, c. 1598. Oil on canvas 46 in × 68 in. (Photo via Wikimedia courtesy the Piasecka-Johnson Collection, Princeton) Sophie Cabot Black (Photo by Alexander Black) "For me, the act of writing comes out of query," poet Sophie Cabot Black explains in a recent interview [...]
The chefs of Sherry's restaurant at luncheon in 1902 (Photo courtesy the Museum of the City of New York, the Byron Company Collection. Click to Enlarge) Wisconsin Death Trip My first introduction to the work of Michael Lesy was a chance encounter many years ago with his classic [...]
Lisa Elmaleh, Paurotis Palms, Everglades, Florida, silver gelatin print, 2010. On view in the Mythology of Florida exhibit at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans through January 5th. (Photo © Lisa Elmaleh via lisaelmaleh.com) "Miriam Sagan's Seven Places is a lovely collection of verbal souvenirs, resonant snapshots plumbing [...]
Lisa Dahl, Suburban Export, household cardboard, 1.5 x 2 x 2 inches (each), installation variable, 2011-12. View the finished installation Suburban Export here. (In-Progress photo of installation by Lisa Dahl courtesy the artist) "Everyone, rich or poor, deserves a shelter for the soul." -Samuel Mockbee The [...]
(Carl Sandburg poetry manuscript photo by Ben Woloszyn via news.illinois.edu) Alice B. Fogel is poised to become the next Poet Laureate in New Hampshire, following in the footsteps of Donald Hall, Maxine Kumin, Jane Kenyon, Patricia Fargnoli, and others. Governor Maggie Hassan recently appointed Fogel to the five-year position. Fogel’s third book, Be [...]
Writer Ed Skoog (Photo by Kelly O courtesy the author) We don't give much thought to the covers of the poetry books we read, but the genre is plagued by amateurish typography and ill-chosen imagery. Copper Canyon Press consistently has some of the strongest, most thoughtful designs, and [...]
Poet Bridget Lowe (Photo by Jennifer Wetzel courtesy the author) The publication of Bridget Lowe's debut collection, At the Autopsy of Vaslav Nijinsky (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2013), is a bit of a full-circle moment for Gwarlingo. Bridget Lowe was one of the first Gwarlingo Sunday Poets, back in the [...]
Poet David Bottoms (Photo courtesy the author) David Bottoms grew up in Canton, Georgia, the only child of David H. Bottoms, a funeral director, and Louise Ashe Bottoms, a registered nurse. Their home had only two books: a King James Bible and a book by preacher Billy Graham. It [...]
Poet Anne Valley-Fox in Oaxaca, Mexico (Photo courtesy the author) "A poet makes everything up, including one’s job description," says Anne Valley-Fox. "My job: to retrieve rejected or edgy bits of inner material and put them together in ways that illuminate and provoke. My poems seek connections, complications, and [...]
Writer Joshua Beckman (Photo courtesy of Wave Books) The poems in Joshua Beckman's new book, The Inside of an Apple (Wave Books, 2013), have all the immediacy of a "V" of geese passing overhead: for a brief moment, everything else falls away. While not technically haiku, Beckman's latest [...]