Devotion and Defiance: A Review of Leila Chatti’s DELUGE
In this stunning debut collection of poetry, Leila Chatti, a citizen of both the United States and Tunisia, brings together a variety of topics that, historically, have not oft been talked about—not in public and not in poems—and when they have arisen, they have often come bearing shame.
The Social Distance Reading Series
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A Review of PARTURITION by Heather Treseler
Heather Treseler’s new chapbook Parturition, named after the technical term for childbirth, is punctuated with medical vocabulary. Anhedonia, the inability to feel pleasure. Caul, a baby born with a piece of amniotic sac on its head. Nullipara, a woman who has never given birth.
Girl Twirling
You orbit around a young star/In a rocket you travel to a pink planet/Fifty-seven light years from Earth
The House That Tim Built
Hannah arrives home from school to find that Tim has removed the entrances to the house again. In place of the front door, an escalator now descends toward her.
Nocturne
Lying beside me with his head on my chest, Strauss, a white and black English Setter I had recently rescued from the local animal shelter, cocked his ears. I glanced up from my book into the velvety darkness outside the second-story bedroom window which, during the day, offered a charming view of the historic mule barge canal as it skirts the Delaware River and threads under the low, arched bridges through New Hope, Pennsylvania, a gentrified mill town just north of where George Washington crossed the Delaware to sneak up on the Hessians.
Review of SHIFT by Marylen Grigas
One of the first poems in Marylen Grigas’ Shift, “About Muscle,” relates the life cycle of a sea squirt, a creature whose time on earth culminates when it comes to rest on a rock and devours its own brain.
Sometimes Two People Come Together With Their Bodies
Sometimes two people
come together with their bodies
and it is so like the way
they feel inside
and the first person holds out
an apple to the second
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.