The Spark of Life Itself: Michael Bazzett’s Verse Translation of the Popol Vuh
he Popol Vuh creation myth stems from the Mayan oral tradition, and was written down in the K’iche’ language between 1554 and 1558. With its roots in deeply communicative ritual, there is great emphasis placed on the relationship between speaking and hearing, as opposed to writing and seeing—“These are the first words. This is the first speaking.”
Recent Posts
Ghost Script: A Review of Nancy Mitchell’s The Out-of-Body-Shop
Michell’s latest collection, The Out of Body Shop, is taut, haunted and emotionally demanding; her poems are archeological exercises: unearthing the past and spreading it in the sun to “burn/off the mold, the stink.”
Spelling Dog Backwards
Write a poem about the way a man / once bitten by a dog can fear all dogs /
for the rest of his life but a woman / once attacked by a man can never say /
she fears men.
The Knock-Knock Bardo & The Beyond
While I travel the world’s / geography, history, / and virtual present, / in mind and poetry—
Infamous
breaks the pattern of pre- fixes and suffixes not taking the stress: [in-fuh-muhs] which makes me think: muh-fuhs as in what you muh-fuhs lookin at? which could have been an infamous last question, given that those muh-fuhs stared at me all the...
The Island
Owen watched Aubrey press her palm into a thick patch of speckled moss girdling the trunk of an old Douglas fir. The move was gentle and precise, how a mime might seek an invisible wall, and he couldn’t help but imagine her locked up in some dark basement, kidnapped, as he suspected she’d been as a child.
Two Poems
Leave that Tiffany bling. It’s a pile of cold cash. / Facile, faceted carbon copies.
Does Yours Have a Heart, Too?
Once there was a person who was tasked with reducing a mountain into a flat plain. For a shopping mall. For a housing development. For a prairie. For the gemstones within. They moved their family to a new home at the base of the mountain, which was tall enough to keep...
Some Words About Proverbs
I’ve played my part as tourist in the Netherlands. In Amsterdam, I skipped out of the way of ring-chiming bicycles. I drank Amstel beer under an awning while an afternoon rain dotted the surface water of the Singel canal.
Review of WHERE WE GO WHEN ALL WE WERE IS GONE by Sequoia Nagamatsu
Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone is haunting literary work, and I mean that literally: ghosts populate the book. The collection is set in modern Japan, where the dead, the undead, and countless characters from Japanese pop culture and cultural myth struggle to exist, and coexist, at the edges of the human world.
At Her Mirror
She slips out of her dress, turns
this way and that, cursing her breasts,
Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter
Editor-in-Chief, powerhouse poet, and all around love, Elizabeth Powell’s newest book Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter gets a nice mention in The New Yorker!
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