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.
The Social Distance Reading Series
Recent Posts
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
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.
A Conversation
The moon does not/want to be touched. /How do I know? /The goats this morning
Four Poems
A lover’s sleeping body is a fallow field / leading to forest understory, saplings / and shrubberies too plentiful to count,
Teeth and Breadcrumbs: A Review of THE CLEARING by Allison Adair
The opening title poem of Allison Adair’s collection The Clearing transforms a recognizable fairy tale into a grim story of a man who may be a “prince or woodcutter or brother, now musty with beard,” all familiar tropes of the genre, and who collects teeth that the girl in the story has dropped instead of breadcrumbs.
Two Poems
the five quarts of my blood moving almost/four miles an hour means the nurse pushing/a morphine shot into my arm watches/my eyes not the needle seconds only
Devotion and Defiance: A Review of Leila Chatti’s DELUGE
In this stunning debut collection of poetry, Leila Chatti, a citizen of both the United States and Tunisia, brings together a variety of topics that, historically, have not oft been talked about—not in public and not in poems—and when they have arisen, they have often come bearing shame.
Two Poems
I walked last night/the dark circle/under my right eye/I carried/a blade
A Review of PARTURITION by Heather Treseler
Heather Treseler’s new chapbook Parturition, named after the technical term for childbirth, is punctuated with medical vocabulary. Anhedonia, the inability to feel pleasure. Caul, a baby born with a piece of amniotic sac on its head. Nullipara, a woman who has never given birth.