He says, You have to know, huh? Well, I listen to it because I can’t stumble into bliss, Can’t kill myself with sugar. It makes my head hurt, she says. I feel plugged into a box of wires Dangling loose. Sampled rigmarole In a gallery of Donatien Alphonse François. He sits in the booth Beside…
Robert Pinsky, Americans’ Favorite Poems: An anthology of poems that were nominated for the Favorite Poem Project, the centerpiece of Pinsky’s Poet Laureateship. Americans from all walks of life were invited to recommend their favorite poems, and thousands have responded with impassioned personal letters, some of which are excerpted here alongside the poems. This anthology…
Staunton, Virginia But what you should concentrate on is my homesickness. All these roadmaps, tickets, thing-in-a-glass-case— What could make you homesick, for what drive until you glimpsed an end? Look: here they have a little Pilgrim village, a little farming lot, a small extravaganza of skirmishes. EVERY HOUR, WEATHER WILLING, the Indians appear, run around,…
It slipped my wrist, vanished in the street dark with steps of no one I know, and late, and late. Picked up, dropped in a stranger’s pocket where the hours, yours, mean nothing but kept time. I never asked whether you wore it then, crossing the street when a car flung out of the rain….
Jane Shore, Happy Family, poems: Shore’s latest volume follows the arc of her life from childhood in a closely knit Jewish family in 1950’s New Jersey to her marriage and parenthood. In humorous, earthy verse, she bridges together experiences in the lives of women in ways both magical and profound. (Picador)
The remarkable thing in dreams: people say what he never hears in waking. Fat. They say it to his face, not behind his back, or clear of earshot. The word is succulent in their mouths-Faaat-stretching out like the waist on his sansabelt pants. Nothing derogatory about it, only an unabashed honesty. On these mornings, for…
Their eggs are laid on lupine. Tiny jade hairstreaks I could easily mistake for dew. Too precious. Too incidental, and besides that, blue, these trills that flounce in my potato patch, drawn from dryland origins to the domestic stain of water from my hose. What an old woman would study, I think as you hand…
Gary Soto, A Natural Man, poems: In his new collection, Soto-who this fall was presented with the Hispanic Heritage Award-gives stirring, authentic voice to Chicano life in the San Joaquin Valley, where he was born and raised. (Chronicle)
Meredith Drum is an atomic bomb, a puppet, is confetti and napalm. Maybe she’s a peony grown annually for the flower show. This year’s first-prize installation, a Hiroshima Imperial Hotel room shattered, bouquets wetting the beds. Through the woods, in darkness obscuring our feet, she leads a few thieves. Foxfire on the trees. She rubs…
No products in the cart.