A Review of Jennifer Militello’s THE PACT
If you are someone like me who usually – but not always – closes her correspondence to friends and family with the word “love,” Jennifer Militello’s “The Pact” (Tupelo Press) might make you want to think about what it means when you use – or withhold – that word.
The Social Virtues Series
Recent Posts
Four Poems
As they were lowering/his coffin in to the ground/beside my mother’s grave/where the grass had regrown–
Welcome Stephen Cramer as our new Assistant Poetry Editor!
The GMR is thrilled to announce that Stephen Cramer will be joining us as Assistant Poetry Editor. We look forward to working even more closely with Stephen.
But Then I Turned Into My Evil Twin: Kindness and Ecstasy
“I am so desperate for that vaccine/I’d knock down an old person/to get it,” someone once said.
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,
Three Poems
Hallmark does not make a card for this/for what we mean to each other,/for what we do when my kids are asleep./We are not married. Not husband and wife.
Two Poems
The satellites have been turned/off turned away from/other satellites.
Emoticonfiscated
It was me on Cookman Ave. that night/the newscaster was in the news/for what apparently everyone had always known
Confession
I did not consider the fact/That for the rest of your life you would only get older/If I’d been thinking, I would have held in my hand
Three Poems
In darkness / empirical evidence underhand / a fingertip rubs black / but not ink.