Masks: Past. Present. Pandemic.
“The human face is, after all, nothing more nor less than a mask,” Agatha Christie said. Our face reveals our true feelings—curiosity, excitement, doubt, disdain—or conceals them.
We put on different faces in different situations, in different company. We perform.
The Social Virtues Series
Recent Posts
Three Poems
Outside it’s North Dakota/And November feels like November, but on the moon.
March Pandemique
…but maybe I’m just a loser/who has read too much
Notes on the Cinema of Depreciation
I’m sorry I stabbed Vann Marsden in the eye. It’s terrible that his wife had to die in the aftermath. The fact that she was already ill and couldn’t take the strain doesn’t alter my sadness over her passing, but when a director takes all the movies you love and remakes them as stark, near silent catalogs of gestures, the critic has to respond.
Three Poems
The daughters argue / when one begins / to clean. You are erasing / every last bit of him / the younger weeps, accusing / her sister of wiping away / signs and smells of the father
Dental Work/Shiny Object
Looking into my / father’s dead mouth I get / a good look at / all that expensive
A Poem
They say: murderous resting face. & I say. Everyone / is a coward. In a ring of fire. There are only fists. / & liars. I sweep a leg. Bloodsport is not. For honor. / Don’t you know my name. What will you call me /
And I, This Speech: Neil Shepard’s How It Is: Selected Poems
Neil Shepard’s How It Is: Selected Poems gathers the greatest hits from six full-length collections by a poet who is both planted and peripatetic. Founder and helmsman for some 25 years of this journal, Shepard has long maintained one base in the landscape of the Green Mountain State’s Northeast Kingdom and one in the urbanscape of New York City.
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.”
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—