What We Hear from our Neighbors
Michael and Sara supervised their neighbor once from their living room window as he cut down a hundred-foot tree alone. Both the maples and the neighbors in that part of Vermont come in one size. Double-XL for the trees. Extra-small talk for the neighbors.
The Social Virtues Series
Recent Posts
Four Poems
Spring brings wind and water to the ruined gardens
of Pannonia, fruit tree boughs toss across
gravel orchard paths as if wildly
dancing
A Review of Kerrin McCadden’s KEEP THIS TO YOURSELF
“I search Craiglist for sadness: a white couch the only result.” begins “Weeks After My Brother Overdoses,” the final poem in Kerrin McCadden’s chapbook, Keep This to Yourself (Button Poetry 2020). McCadden’s latest collection is a strikingly blunt yet beautifully lyrical meditation on what it means to lose a loved one to America’s current opioid crisis.
New Release: Turn It Up! edited by Stephen Cramer
Turn It Up! Music in Poetry from Jazz to Hip-Hop, edited by Stephen Cramer, is a vibrant and hip anthology of 400 pages, including poems by everyone from Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, and Rita Dove to Yusef Komunyakaa, Kim Addonizio, Kevin Young, and Danez Smith. The book contains 88 poets in all (the number of keys on a piano), and is split up into three sections: poems about jazz, poems about blues and rock, and poems about hip-hop.
Two Poems
POMPEII
Through the stereoscope I see
myself preserved in ash
in a glass cage three dimensionally.
Hail the Size of
the cubicle where we daily toil, the demoniac cackling erupting
from the empty spaces down the hall, size of an in-box
crammed with memos and motions, size of the St. Louis Arch,
The Sun-and-Moon Book
When my daughter was three, in those young mothering years of just her and I, the vibrant autumn days when we walked along our Vermont dirt road, picking knotty apples from wild roadside trees, and out of sheer rural loneliness I wished for someone to stop and talk, I wrote a novel.
Lost Year
Twenty-seven is too old for my sister to run away from home, but, after seven unreturned phone calls, I started seeing signs in vegetables.
Review of DESOLATION OF AVENUES UNTOLD by Brandon Hobson
Desolation of Avenues Untold by Brandon Hobson Civil Coping Mechanisms. 2015. I’m probably not the intended audience for Desolation of Avenues Untold, by Brandon Hobson, though my experience of reading the book was singular. It’s a decidedly unusual work of fiction, a...
Bolger
Bolger was not a friend of mine, but we had known each other for over twenty years, starting when he was married to his first wife and I was married to my only wife.
Retrograde
Your mother dies. Your family members kneel around her bed in the living room, the hospice nurses in the background. You envision this scene as an oil painting by Poussin, Botticelli. Woman at Rest. People say that when a person expires, their spirit can be sensed in the room. You feel nothing.
Review of GATEWAY TO PARADISE by Matthew Vollmer
‘What is Paradise?’ Matthew Vollmer’s unified story collection, Gateway to Paradise begs to explore. With symbols and motifs dating back to Eden, Vollmer aptly juxtaposes verdant beauty with the garish, honky-tonk nature of tourism, thus creating a complex emotional terrain that vacillates between absurdly funny and deeply disturbing as his characters encounter desire.