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...
The Social Virtues Series
Recent Posts
A Review of Mark Wunderlich’s GOD OF NOTHINGNESS
The experience of reading Mark Wunderlich’s fourth poetry book, God of Nothingness, mirrors the page-turning necessity and immediacy of a can’t-put-it-down novel: We must learn what happens next.
The Mother Who Says Yes to the Sword
O has-been mother of the free-flowing booze
& handy diet pills,
You cashed me in—a cool sacrifice: to jump-
Start your floundering career,
Two Poems
Poetess Anoints Herself In wild audacity I wedded Word, obscured ragged frock made fit for my existence. I claimed branch broken weavings as my...
Two Poems
Lime Green “Picnic Set”...
A Review of Traci Brimhall’s Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod
In her latest collection, Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod, Traci Brimhall takes on the impossible task of all mothers: she tries to sing us to sleep. But even sleep can’t save us from the violence and chaos of the world. Even in sleep, there is a haunting, a symbolic language which speaks to us of the world we will return to upon waking.
End Times for the Poker Face
Growing up, one of my favorite shows was My Favorite Martian. If you’re not sufficiently ancient or addicted to terrible — I mean, retro-cool — TV to remember, Ray Walston’s title character looked like a human but had knitting-needle antennae he could raise from the back of his head, plus an aluminum foil spacesuit and other unspecial effects. Bill Bixby, his Hulk days still ahead, spent three seasons in the 60s trying to conceal from the neighbors that Uncle Martin was an alien. Hijinks ensued.
Canceled
Some canceled and some didn’t. They canceled because canceling was proposed. They said yes, I will, and canceled. Others said no but had to cancel anyway.
Fool at High Noon
Fool finally realizes why the marshall
deputized him and then blew town.
First thing he’ll have to do is buy
a gun—fast—then learn how to use it
A Review of Terese Svoboda’s Great American Desert
Great American Desert By Terese Svoboda Ohio State Press, 2019 Terese Svoboda opens her 18th book Great American Desert with an epigraph that reminds readers that many of the greatest civilizations are now desert wastelands--and that the West is...
La Edad de la Ternura
Every day after classes
we pick up Sonia from La Facultad.
That first year when she thought herself a doctor
and tried to help El Pedigueno with a stick through his hand.
Four Poems
Sometimes you see something so
dreadful that the mind’s camera snaps a shot,
shoots a video of the scenario,
lasers it into your retina’s screen on the spot,
impaled in you for as long as you live: