A Review of Kerrin McCadden’s AMERICAN WAKE
American Wakeby Kerrin McCaddenBlack Sparrow Press, 2021 From its epigraph to its final line, award-winning poet Kerrin McCadden’s exquisite third book, American Wake, is about going places. In its energetic momentum, we encounter who moves on and who and what is left...
The Social Virtues Series
Recent Posts
Keeping an Eye Out for Cougars
Narrow was what they called my cousin who is now as exquisite as the Kenyan model pouting on the cover of French Vogue, but before we were of age, I was the pretty one, light, with good hair, and regular. In every photo from the seventies she was my shadow. I’d...
There are no more silkworms in the wild
Maybe I am being sensitive but when C is teaching our Sunday morning Black-Lesbians- Only-Group about silkworms, I become anxious. We are curling over ourselves, watching through computer screens: a video of women's hands laying out carpets and carpets of...
Love Below the Stairs
Daryl lifts the top of the velvet jewelry box with his free hand and carefully scans the pieces. “Oh! Gimmie here!”
Two Poems
Enough red to end / all desire for sex—reflected / in her stern countenance. / Her stance mocks / any sense of calm.
Meet our new interns!
Introducing our newest interns
Stuck to the Safety
Your father is lying on the couch under a quilt with an Apsáalooke print on it. He tells you, I’m sorry I can’t go, this thing is killing me. And you nod your head that folds your high-necked sweater down because it is old and has been worn and washed time and again. You are hot, standing there in your sweater and your jacket and your bright vest with your wool hat and two layers of pants. He tells you, You’ll be fine but stay off the reservation. He tells you he’s expecting big things from you—that you will feed the family over the winter after today.
The Serpent of Eighth Hole
When I came home from summer camp in the Poconos in 1958, Knutt showed me a pair of turtles he’d caught in Queen Anne Creek. Silver-dollar-size painted terrapins basked on sunlit mats of watercress that grew against Queen Anne’s banks like barrier reefs beside the deeper, more quickly flowing clear-water channel midstream.
A Review of Jen Karetnick’s THE CROSSING OVER
A Review of Jen Karetnick’s THE CROSSING OVER
Still Life
A shoe stands / at the forest edge, / tongue depressed / with spectacles / and one gray sock.
City with Imogen Inside
My husband shared his cigarettes with me + so when I die / I do with lungs like eggplants. My floral dress snapped at the waist because
The World Already on Fire: Dzvinia Orlowsky’s Bad Harvest
Bad Harvest is a resonant folk song that fills the chambers of the future with echoes of the past. Its complex twists of hereditary and personal relations with language and work open a chasm of concern for the future that Dzvinia Orlowsky locates and does a little dance on the edge of. She stares openly, even mockingly, into the pit of impermanence and unpredictability, spinning the prescribed doom and mortality of what we all know shall end: health, love, and livelihood.