Seeking Shelter
Though the library was closed, the lights had briefly blazed on, and she guessed Baker had broken in again. When Susan rushed through the front door and saw Baker, she grabbed the desk phone and shouted that she was dialing 911. Baker then fled through the side door. Then Susan called me, the librarian of this one-room rural Vermont library.
The Social Virtues Series
Recent Posts
Grief, Memory, and Language: A Review of Victoria Chang’s OBIT
Victoria Chang’s collection, Obit, seems to have anticipated the prolonged good-byes of 2020. In it, Chang says good-bye to loved ones, feelings, objects—everything we feel and know, who we were and where we’re heading—especially when someone we love is dying, and our sense of awareness is heightened.
What Comes Alive Through Death: A Review of Jill Bialosky’s Collection ASYLUM
This stunning book-length poem, broken up into 103 sections, examines the grief and trauma associated with losing a young sister from suicide. Threaded also through these lyrics is a conversation with Paul Celan’s Selected Poems and Dante’s Inferno.
Three Poems
The shoemaker labors over his leather, his work./A singular lightbulb illuminates his hands, like a ner tamid,
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—
June Pruning
My husband stands under the lilac, clippers in hand, / squints up at bare twigs / among the heavy, spent blossoms.
Lake Monsters
We make the best of what we’ve got. Two tents, a flat piece of land, a nylon hammock that packs down to nearly nothing. We stuff the cooler with ice, but the week-long heat wave stretching across Vermont means we’re careful about opening it too often. One too many times, you say, and everything will go bad. The eggs will hard-boil in their carton, the fat on the bacon will start to crisp.
Poetic Magic: A Modern Metaphysical
By the time I finished Dan Lewis’s collection Intimations of the Focal Plane many sections of my journal were scribbled over with citations of snippets from the tome. His words, blazed and blazoned on my pages, had magically transformed each into a focal plane of its own.
Two Poems
Side effects may include digging / a hole in your personal snow / to a time before your heart / floated next to your father’s heart