The Luminous World of Maurya Simon
Maurya Simon’s The Wilderness: New and Selected Poems 1980-2016 (Red Hen Press 2018, 218 pages) represents a life of questioning and perception, whether the scene is a backyard or a street in Bangalore or the ekphrastic poems of The Weavers or reflections on sinners and saints.
The Social Distance Reading Series
Recent Posts
A Review of PRAYING NAKED by Katie Condon
“Here I am/in a century that has its eyes/shut tight,” writes Katie Condon in “Origin,” the first poem in her debut collection Praying Naked (Mad Creek Books 2020). Like so many of the poems, “Origin” moves fluidly between an I and an us, between the natural world and the one created by human beings.
Three Poems
what if i kill the stars first when a medical document asks my marital status i write, trying not to get my hopes up about sunlight that’s what it feels like even in the fuck me state some bleach-white beach in florida where i lived on bourbon with a co-conspirator...
Matrilineation: Homage to Nell Parker (1944-2015)
I’m trying to imagine you imagining me/finding, at the bottom of a plastic storage bin—/under clippings from your Daily Camera column
Uprooted
It was good to fill the sinkhole myself after the landscaper/botched the job. Beneath the plant he poised, thirsty/on red clay—divots of emptiness. Ten bags of top soil go in/smelling of the deciduous north, released
Two Poems
Is it the flaw no one had noticed in the inlaid featherwork from which we can infer
Paradoxical Mourning in Edward Hirsch’s GABRIEL A POEM and STRANGER BY NIGHT
Paul Klee once said, “He has found his style, when he cannot do otherwise.” There are poets whose language takes on this kind of inevitability, something Rilke called the “unconcealedness of being,” which shimmers on, star-like and unbidden, shouldering the pain of loss.
From MR CHANCE
in Australia a recent production of Merchant of Venice changed the ending –/ what have I done?
Four Poems
All my registers say hush/A spider pushes each ounce of knowledge against the ground/Her hydraulic soldiers
Two Poems
this is how they work together in her mind/at a proper distance from each other
A Review of HOLD ME TIGHT by Jason Schneiderman
Hold Me Tight by Jason Schneiderman is a book of five sections that vary in style, tone, and form — it is a book of fables, fantasies, and hilarious futures.