The writer on America’s fear culture, bookstores as community builders, and why writers should care about their character more than their characters.
Erica Wright talks to translator André Naffis-Sahely about translating one of Morocco's greatest living poets and the 'commodity' of despair.
“I wanted history I could touch like a flank of a beast.”
she, standing there now with all the immodest strength / of a clapboard house, who has not even asked for this light.
Moonlight poured fiery poison into my life.
I’d sleep against the wall in the unemployment line / next to men who slit throats in another country
You can no more waterboard yourself / than sneak up on yourself at a party
I carried our wedding china out to the dock, threw every goblet into the ocean.
Our guest poetry editor selects poems that sit on "the knife edge between what we call the everyday and what we call the night."
Half of this / is an illusion. See here you / there is no place that does not from.
It’s your turn, it’s always your turn, / the night says.
When we returned by a pinprick in darkness / we found ourselves in childhood
Erica Wright talks with a poet who didn’t set out to write about war.
What unnameable would throw this on the floor, / noon refracted through blue windows
Daughter, your mother’s prayer teeth would sharpen / and shred your opaque sack of sleep.
the prairies are overrun with pioneer wives out of time / carrying rifles
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.
Good evening Secretary of the Interior Brain, glowing / wick of my infomercial light
the vertebrae went down and already / I saw no more than eternity and coldness
I never did heal, we each / took our turns at crying in cubicles
Just tell me it’s impossible for someone / to stop being invincible later on after starting out that way.
I looked in the mirror and saw myself stealing things with a devil.
It means you can still feel the heavy thrum of thigh / on saddle, can smell the man’s blood-hunger
but the girl stayed dancing / underwater a wild catfish tangled in broken whiskers / until you couldn’t tell them apart
First he suspected she swallowed / the pins herself from compulsion, but then no, that was not it.
What’d’ya mean you don’t know me? / I’ve bought bibles off you before!
Who's coughing? It's my throat, that's all. / Really, no.—I never saw you.
The trouble with night // is morning, she’s singing, wringing out socks / over a tub
A conversation between poets about writing place, time, technology, and transformation.
How we blink and chew and find ourselves // cubicle-hunched, tightened under humming fluorescents
Poet Jaswinder Bolina discusses writing about race, the process of being translated, and more.
When they finish, let them lob / the spent meat and mumped skin / like siege shot.
Once the bone has been ground up, who, through muslin, would recognize her hand from a dog’s paw?
Starve us, // stave off hyenas with our youth— / our muscle as protein, lion’s bait.
Under this desk I have hidden / for two months. I have tried / at shadowy. Have failed / at being wonderful.
...you can sleep without stretching your legs; / you can live never lifting your head.
Everyone’s face reminds me of a buried city, cars up on blocks leaning through // the slanted light (like jail cells)...
...their sleeping, their dormancy, / how it stirred in me a hunger / black as a pocked tooth.
She is knee-sick and fawning on her felt-tipped prize / for exceeding her bones in the sprinting test.
Oftentimes the bourbon distilleries in this land I’ve pitched / my tent in under-distribute for what I have in mind.
When my arms first grew firm I began to trust / myself to love someone outside my family.
I carried a machine on my back / from a tundra to a new northwest.
we talk about getting another widow / for her to putter with
in the outskirts of Lisbon, the Afrikander, / builds a bone temple for all the lads
Wet pets lounge out in the trees, all the abandoned bits / children leave, beyond what the self wants (to be bigger, / less attached).
I have written this poem on the theme “To the post-3.11 world, as I see it,” but this is just the prelude.
I would make, / it occurs to me one / sun-smeared evening after too much vodka, not / a bad Aztec.
Tonight’s theme is: you are a baby nihilist.
I’ve seen him before, crawling / under church pews, tying // parishioners’ shoes together.
A tale crashing in the glass garden
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, 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.
| 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. |
