When Ann Patchett Is Emperor
The writer on America’s fear culture, bookstores as community builders, and why writers should care about their character more than their characters.
André Naffis-Sahely: Sublimated Rebellion
Erica Wright talks to translator André Naffis-Sahely about translating one of Morocco's greatest living poets and the 'commodity' of despair.
Gregory Pardlo: The Poem as Pursuit
“I wanted history I could touch like a flank of a beast.”
The Easement
to startle / one dead to what living’s no longer worth.
Hopper’s Women
she, standing there now with all the immodest strength / of a clapboard house, who has not even asked for this light.
Kafka Erases His Father With Moonlight
Moonlight poured fiery poison into my life.
Said Gun Sleeps
I’d sleep against the wall in the unemployment line / next to men who slit throats in another country
In Which Forest
you gripped the axe’s handle, forever poised / to make a mark
Luz
If, in the church, there was blood / her blood was colorless
Elegy With Agency
You can no more waterboard yourself / than sneak up on yourself at a party
the years
where does dark begin settling / my little bones.
Adelle Steals the Key To
I carried our wedding china out to the dock, threw every goblet into the ocean.
My Father Gave the Neighbors
my mother / unraveled both her eyes to the ravens
Some Otherside, Some Subterranean
Our guest poetry editor selects poems that sit on "the knife edge between what we call the everyday and what we call the night."
Adrift
Half of this / is an illusion. See here you / there is no place that does not from.
Late Style
before she announced her arrival, she devoured it.
Guidebooks for the Dead
I could feel something bright / As it left the body.
Discrepancies Regarding My Mother’s Departure
It’s your turn, it’s always your turn, / the night says.
House-Sitting With Approaching Fire
Dear friends / the ash-fall is thickening here
The Unfinished
When we returned by a pinprick in darkness / we found ourselves in childhood
DNA
you’re nothing, / absolutely nothing, / but a Palestinian.
Ground Rules
Here, we always sell / the negatives for free.
Shelly Taylor: Shattered Language
Erica Wright talks with a poet who didn’t set out to write about war.
Gate 134
What unnameable would throw this on the floor, / noon refracted through blue windows
You Blast Off, I’ll Drive
We ferried into America on the pitch of the same folksong.
Refugee (Baghdad 2003)
Daughter, your mother’s prayer teeth would sharpen / and shred your opaque sack of sleep.
Tongariro
We are resting from our courage.
Prometheus
Fever wasn’t the only thing to break / in Cambodia
Bruno Sits on a Washing Machine
the prairies are overrun with pioneer wives out of time / carrying rifles
Barbara Hamby: A Muscle of Belief
The Guggenheim fellow on returning to free verse in her latest collection, the difficulty of being joyful, and why poetry has taken the place of religion in her life.
Alex Lemon: Ferocious Kind of Music
Why poetry needs more grit.
Cameraman
Good evening Secretary of the Interior Brain, glowing / wick of my infomercial light
I OBSERVED the acidic moisture
the vertebrae went down and already / I saw no more than eternity and coldness
Wherever the nurse touches you
the way your blood here to there / drifts off course
Northerly
There is no word for emergency after the body / wilts.
Deaf Sign for Beautiful
I never did heal, we each / took our turns at crying in cubicles
Kuzguncuk Hotel
what’s life but where my memories keep shacking up
Psychopomp
The popular literature says I got / the right amount of sleep
Dear Juniper,
Just tell me it’s impossible for someone / to stop being invincible later on after starting out that way.
Expeditions to the Polar Seas
This is when I’d like to see gravity happen.
Sunrise
The rope almost loops / in an obvious feast of beheading.
The Disposal of Evil, 1926
I looked in the mirror and saw myself stealing things with a devil.
Headstand
my question to you is how will we hold off distress
Milk Teeth
It means you can still feel the heavy thrum of thigh / on saddle, can smell the man’s blood-hunger
Stories of Svet
but the girl stayed dancing / underwater a wild catfish tangled in broken whiskers / until you couldn’t tell them apart
Ritual of the Bacabsas The Strange Case of Kate Abbott
First he suspected she swallowed / the pins herself from compulsion, but then no, that was not it.
You Knock a Third Time
What’d’ya mean you don’t know me? / I’ve bought bibles off you before!
Through the Long Greenhouse
I stepped so cleanly out / the leeches clinked and fell
An excerpt from “A Kind of Goodbye”
Who's coughing? It's my throat, that's all. / Really, no.—I never saw you.
She Gets To Him First
The trouble with night // is morning, she’s singing, wringing out socks / over a tub
Phoenix
He saw kind rich men walking through the dark as if through a city.
Idra Novey and Andrew Zawacki: Courting Influxes
A conversation between poets about writing place, time, technology, and transformation.
Prairie Restoration Project
How we blink and chew and find ourselves // cubicle-hunched, tightened under humming fluorescents
Sotoportego del casin dei nobili
I lose my mind, you’re without foreskin.
Jaswinder Bolina: Avoiding the Obvious
Poet Jaswinder Bolina discusses writing about race, the process of being translated, and more.
In Lieu of Flowers,
When they finish, let them lob / the spent meat and mumped skin / like siege shot.
Après Coup
This is the vocabulary of killing.
Wish
Once the bone has been ground up, who, through muslin, would recognize her hand from a dog’s paw?
Twenty Flora
Live an orchard life then pulp it for another.
Cages
We see the night / for what it really is, a house / for our bodies
Honey Badger Duet
Starve us, // stave off hyenas with our youth— / our muscle as protein, lion’s bait.
Blessed Are The Weak (For They Are No Good)
Under this desk I have hidden / for two months. I have tried / at shadowy. Have failed / at being wonderful.
Four Walls
...you can sleep without stretching your legs; / you can live never lifting your head.
Futurity
Everyone’s face reminds me of a buried city, cars up on blocks leaning through // the slanted light (like jail cells)...
The Castle Avenue With Trees
And I know: a hitch-hiker who never enters!
Self-Portrait as an Incubus
...their sleeping, their dormancy, / how it stirred in me a hunger / black as a pocked tooth.
Watercolor Kit
She is knee-sick and fawning on her felt-tipped prize / for exceeding her bones in the sprinting test.
Apologia Numerica
Oftentimes the bourbon distilleries in this land I’ve pitched / my tent in under-distribute for what I have in mind.
Bow
When my arms first grew firm I began to trust / myself to love someone outside my family.
Inventing the Etymology of My Newest Country
I carried a machine on my back / from a tundra to a new northwest.
[it feels like tattling]
we talk about getting another widow / for her to putter with
Eusthenopteron
A huge is an instinct, / a severe is a creature / of proportion.
The Afrikander
in the outskirts of Lisbon, the Afrikander, / builds a bone temple for all the lads
Paper Flowers & Cyber Peacocks
Let us legally do what we must do in the dark
Ick Worms
Wet pets lounge out in the trees, all the abandoned bits / children leave, beyond what the self wants (to be bigger, / less attached).
at the side (côtés) of poetry
I have written this poem on the theme “To the post-3.11 world, as I see it,” but this is just the prelude.
The Destruction of Tenochtitlan; or, What I Did on My Summer Vacation
I would make, / it occurs to me one / sun-smeared evening after too much vodka, not / a bad Aztec.
Risk Management Memo: Continuing Education
Tonight’s theme is: you are a baby nihilist.
Portrait of a Tyrant
I’ve seen him before, crawling / under church pews, tying // parishioners’ shoes together.
His Induction
I’ll death so well they’ll say dying is ripping me off
The Second Tale: XV, from Tales of a Severed Head
A tale crashing in the glass garden
Scarecrow
Everything that can be done to a man / was done to him.
Junk
We were always restless in the boondocks.
Summer by the Ravine
I wish there were simpler words for this—to reach a point zero or the limit, to write: "It was so hard without you."
Beth Harrison: Preparing for Poem in Your Pocket Day
Beth Harrison, interim director of the Academy of American Poets, talks about the value of a national poetry month, the well-versed movie, and Poem in Your Pocket Day.
Emily Fragos: You Know Nothing of This Freedom
Best YA Trend of 2011
Sex, Lies, and Iambic Pentameter
| The events in Measure for Measure prove we have not come far enough when a man’s word still counts for more than a woman’s and when an elected official can play by a different set of rules than the rest of us. |
