Three Poems
I’ve hung my light blue/evening gown on the bedroom/door so that at night,/when I turn away from you to sleep,/I still have something to look at—
The Social Distance Reading Series
Recent Posts
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.
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...
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.
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