beyond hardware
i peruse paint samples to learn what shade names you. a blend of calumet cream1 and ivory2 and atyour cheek blush rose, but i didn’t need a color chart for that. at six months, you have lost theshimmer that teens buy cheap or steal in their first transgressions, but...
The Social Virtues Series
Recent Posts
A Series of Misunderstandings
About blood: it’s only one means of being alive.Every living cognitive doesn’t have or use itto transport nutrients & oxygen. Sometimescreatures...
Badminton with Annie Dillard
sneakers with jagged blue diagonals. I am her dazzled student whom she has agreed to volley. We are not keeping score. Every other shot she makes is a soaring lob. Her flashy underhands shuttle the cock just shy of the gym ceiling’s high beams.
“A Meal of Only Tongues”: A Review of Amy Beeder’s AND SO WAX WAS MADE & ALSO HONEY
Halfway through Amy Beeder’s third, full-length collection, And so Wax was Made and Also Honey, we encounter a persona poem in the voice of the 19th century author Gustave Flaubert, known for coining the phrase le mot juste, meaning “the exact (or right) word.” He defined this as the guiding principle of his writing. The inclusion of him in Beeder’s most recent collection is fitting, as Beeder, too, appears to take this as a guiding precept for her work. Each of the poems that span this 61-page collection have been crafted by a master wordsmith who excels at finding the perfect language with which to dazzle and awe her readers.
Four Poems
tight embrace as if you’d break on letting go. I saw the sky for what it was: immaculate field, burial ground. A voice cried out from across the lake: “Abelard! Heloise!”—your uncle Fulbert calling us to return “right now!” A thousand minnows circled our legs like shiny badges. I couldn’t speak as I gazed at you too deep in bliss to utter a word, too damn ecstatic. We swam ashore and dressed in vain.
A Conversation between Paul Nemser (A Thousand Curves) and Terese Svoboda (Theatrix: Poetry Plays) April 2021
Paul Nemser’s poetry book A Thousand Curves, which received the Editor’s Choice Award from Red Mountain Press, was published in April, 2021. Taurus (2013) won the New American Poetry Prize. Nemser’s poems appear widely in magazines, including AGNI,...
Thea Matthews
She Says We’re dreams walking in the world on the land of red skin red blood on the land of a civil war She says we will walk on rifles for freedom on missiles for food on the hymns of spirituals humming the cries of our children ...
Interview of Kristine Snodgrass
I first became aware of Kristine Snodgrass’s art through WAAVe (Women Asemic Artists & Visual Poets,) a project for which she is founder and curator. Asemic art/writing is a developing art/writing form which utilizes the gesture of writing (without established...
Review: 101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millenium
101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium, edited by Matthew E. Silverman and Nancy Naomi Carlson (Ashland Poetry Press, 2021), arrives just in time — in the midst of a pandemic, after an alarming resurgence of anti-Semitism in the United States, if not across the world.
Notes of a Masked Son
I THE IDEA FOR MY TEN-MINUTE SESSION COMES TO ME SOON AFTER I RESPOND to Candace Hunter’s call for participants. She asks friends—fellow artists, collectors, and other supporters—to sit across from her in silence on her house’s front lawn on a Sunday afternoon, the...
Two Poems
Every train I’ve ever run for has left me & still, I find myself gripping my straps & pounding pavement, waving down whoever’s evening blurs behind the power lines & purpling clouds. I do not wish loneliness of any kind upon anybody, but I’d take...
Matrix of all Relation: The Death Spiral
The Death Spiral by Sarah GiragosianBlack Lawrence Press, 2020. “To rend: this is what I want,” says the intrepid and metamorphic speaker of The Death Spiral, from the poem “Notes Toward an Apology” wherein the speaker slices a tomato open with her fingernail,...