Prose is what we add to myth: Sam Taylor’s Book of Fools
The music at the center of Sam Taylor’s Book of Fools is a soulful dance between myth and memory. In this work, Taylor’s Orpheus, one of several interacting characters, accompanies the reader through the gaps in the underworld and the speaker’s inner world, tinged with loss and longing but sustained by the central feature of the work: the lyric.
The Social Virtues Series
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beyond hardware
i peruse paint samples to learn what shade names you. a blend of calumet cream1 and ivory2 and atyour cheek blush rose, but i didn’t need a color...
Mud and Honey
Beyond the six windows of our little world is a sea that rises with wind and temper. Nothing is even anymore, the horizon an old lunatic, bashing its head against a tilted sky. White caps form on the backs of swells, the Aleutian volcanoes sleeping behind spitting rain and haze. It’s early season in Bristol Bay, where I work as a deckhand on a commercial fishing vessel for the summer, catching sockeye salmon on the eastern edge of the Bering Sea.
eight years
not nearly enough to cleanse the stench, funk / grime and crime within the walls of an estate corrupt / not enough to baptize a new beginning or / dissolve evil embedded in historical detail
A Meeting of the Film Society
I was abandoned under the marquee of a movie theater. I was raised by ushers and ticket takers and projectionists. My earliest memory is of William Powell and Myrna Loy. My earliest memory is of Silvia Pinal in a wedding dress, holding a candelabra. My earliest memory...
A Series of Misunderstandings
About blood: it’s only one means of being alive.Every living cognitive doesn’t have or use itto transport nutrients & oxygen. Sometimescreatures use alternative systems. This meansthere are ways of being alive that look nothinglike the somatic supposition opposite...
Badminton with Annie Dillard
sneakers with jagged blue diagonals. I am her dazzled student whom she has agreed to volley. We are not keeping score. Every other shot she makes is a soaring lob. Her flashy underhands shuttle the cock just shy of the gym ceiling’s high beams.
“A Meal of Only Tongues”: A Review of Amy Beeder’s AND SO WAX WAS MADE & ALSO HONEY
Halfway through Amy Beeder’s third, full-length collection, And so Wax was Made and Also Honey, we encounter a persona poem in the voice of the 19th century author Gustave Flaubert, known for coining the phrase le mot juste, meaning “the exact (or right) word.” He defined this as the guiding principle of his writing. The inclusion of him in Beeder’s most recent collection is fitting, as Beeder, too, appears to take this as a guiding precept for her work. Each of the poems that span this 61-page collection have been crafted by a master wordsmith who excels at finding the perfect language with which to dazzle and awe her readers.
Stone
Unfortunately for me and my wife, Elissa, a subject arose that impelled Rock to hold forth. Rock was married to Elissa’s long-time friend, Ruby, and seeing and hearing Rock had become part of remaining friends with Ruby. We’d recently moved into a new house, and the empty lot next door had come up for sale. We’d considered buying it to preserve a view of some trees from our screen porch, but the seller’s asking price was far too high.
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.
Heartbreak, Uncertainty, and Healing
These Few Seeds by Meghan SterlingTerrapin Books, 2021. “Maybe in death we become a collage / of what we have most longed for— / finally you are roots, seeds, earth…” This line from “Memorial at a Japanese Lilac” in Meghan Sterling’s poetry collection, These Few...
Three Poems
On Kansas 156 All the radio has to sayis eighties rock and Kenny Rogers.You get behind a horse trailerand stay there because you can’t seearound it and, oh man,the radio seek stops on “Right Down The Line,”Gerry Rafferty making love sound uncrappy whether you’re...