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About Rosanna Warren

As the work of Rosanna Warren reminds us, to be a poet is to be a writer of poems. The forces of abstraction that threaten always to turn real individual artworks into mere manifestations of moods or (worse) theories or (worst of all) institutions—these forces go limp before poems so brilliantly made. The sculptures are…

To a Horseshoe Crab

Strange arachnid, distant cousin of deer ticks and potato bugs, those armored pellets that live between bark and wood, stone and dirt. Unlike them you wash up hapless on beaches more a bowl than a shoe. You come in squads after mating in the waters of your birth, dragging the useless scabbard of your tail….

Semper Augustus

Broken tulip, 17th-century Holland The plain white petal between her finger and thumb belled into a sail pregnant with nothing it could bear, then split, dark seamed, its length. A whole fleet foundered in the field around her: bands of white tulips, red and yellow, diluted to shadow beneath a setting moon splinted against the…

In the Darkness

In the darkness I can see every line of your face. As if you are in my womb. Your fingers feel for its entrance and I am your mother, imagining what you will look like when you are born. When I climb after you into the freshly laundered white duvet, and look at your face…

The Man I Respected

When I came back from Mexico, I looked like death. My mouth broke down, weather-beaten. I was paying for my sins, my palate had melted. I could touch my brain directly with my tongue. It was painful, terrible, and sweet. While Svetozar was sitting outside, the cabinet of dental instruments was crashing down. I brought…

Contributors’ Notes

ANNE ATIK‘s two books of poems are Words in Hock (1974) and Offshore (1991), both from Enitharmon Press. She also authored the memoir How It Was, about her friendship with Samuel Beckett. Other work has appeared in APR, The Partisan Review, Literary Imagination, Pequod, and The Nation, among others. AMY BEEDER‘s first book is Burn…

Pan

Old man, why shake a wrinkled prick at the young girls? They scream in harmony, scramble off, and then in mottled light, our eyes meet: you, unbalanced on the hoof of an orthopedic shoe, leaning on a stick, gumming your sly grin back into stubble as with a palsy- humbled hand you try to zip…