Larry Levis Is an Alien That Knows God Will Always Be 17
All I know is that I was somewhere in space and time reading Larry Levis. /
A poem about God. How God is always and forever 17.
The Social Virtues Series
Recent Posts
Fern King
ACCORDING to Wikihow.com, the proper way to launder a cashmere sweater is hand wash with mild soap, then lay flat on a clean towel. This is more or less what Jane said last night, now confirmed by an independent third party. Can’t she be righteously, indignantly wrong for once? I want to live in a world where my girlfriend bungles the essential facts about an important laundry controversy, and then I go down on her and we watch Hulu and never fight ever. Is that too much to ask?
The Ghost We Call Meaning: A Review of Vijay Seshadri’s That Was Now, This Is Then
That Was Now, This Is Then Vijay Sheshadri Graywolf, 2020. “We are obsessed with ourselves,” wrote theoretical physicist, Carlo Rovelli in his book,...
This was Then, That was Now: An Interview with poet Vijay Seshadri
As editor of Green Mountains Review, I would like to extend deep gratitude to Vijay Seshadri for speaking with us about his new book This Was Now, That Was Then (Graywolf, 2020). Seshadri won the Pulitzer Prize for his collection 3 Sections in 2014. Currently, he is Poetry Editor at The Paris Review and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. He is also the editor of The Essential T.S. Eliot.
— E. Powell, May 13, 2021
Two Poems
Horizontal pock-marked rocks lie
in the shallow swamp like tombstones
to fallen alligators—as if to say Cassius
lived here, Orion slept there, and Sirius
ate turtles just beyond this path.
Four Poems
Spring brings wind and water to the ruined gardens
of Pannonia, fruit tree boughs toss across
gravel orchard paths as if wildly
dancing
A Review of Kerrin McCadden’s KEEP THIS TO YOURSELF
“I search Craiglist for sadness: a white couch the only result.” begins “Weeks After My Brother Overdoses,” the final poem in Kerrin McCadden’s chapbook, Keep This to Yourself (Button Poetry 2020). McCadden’s latest collection is a strikingly blunt yet beautifully lyrical meditation on what it means to lose a loved one to America’s current opioid crisis.
New Release: Turn It Up! edited by Stephen Cramer
Turn It Up! Music in Poetry from Jazz to Hip-Hop, edited by Stephen Cramer, is a vibrant and hip anthology of 400 pages, including poems by everyone from Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, and Rita Dove to Yusef Komunyakaa, Kim Addonizio, Kevin Young, and Danez Smith. The book contains 88 poets in all (the number of keys on a piano), and is split up into three sections: poems about jazz, poems about blues and rock, and poems about hip-hop.
Books in Conversation
To read Bodega by Su Hwang is to immerse oneself in a world, but to read this debut poetry collection in tandem with Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong is to deepen one’s understanding of what it means to be raised in the United States as a Korean daughter of immigrants. Both offer prismatic sides of living in a racialized nation where “Asian American” is a box to check off on official census documents, and another way to categorize human experience.
Learning to Fly
My mother was a beautiful bird who fluttered around people in a state of constant agitation. Terrified of being trapped, she was always opening windows, even in the middle of January, and rushing out of doors “to catch a breath of fresh air.” Once outside, she would disappear in an instant, only to return hours later, the wind and leaves and twigs in her hair.
Revealing the Personal in Bridget Lowe’s My Second Work: A Review
To read a Bridget Lowe poem is to observe a gradual transformation, a transmutation of the ordinary into progressively more extraordinary metaphysical states. Anyone who read Lowe’s first book At the Autopsy of Vaslav Nijinsky will be excited to see, in her new collection My Second Work, a return of the same immense imagination, which she utilizes with surgical precision to prod at what makes us human.
Loss and New Life in the Time of Covid
Anna is pregnant again, and with a girl. I can feel my daughter through Anna’s skin—the future pressing into the present—squirms and kicks that protrude across her distended belly. It feels like last time, she tells me. Similar sensations.