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  • Obscenity

    “Obscenity” is often not an expression by an individual uttered under great stress and condemned as bad taste, but one permitted and even prescribed by society. —E. E. Evans-Pritchard, British social anthropologist, 1925 Among the Ba-Ila (“among” as if swarming the petri dish of the British Imperialist), there exist expressions used collectively, that is, in…

  • Shoeshine

    1. For the one on top, polished, sartorial, but abstracted as Lincoln on his Memorial, fingers tapping the armrests, or flapping his newspaper, time at this connecting stop slows like winter on a mink-oiled Little Leaguer’s glove . . . When each shoe is stripped, finally, of its upper layers of the world, a silver-…

  • About Marie Howe: A Profile

    In 1987, Marie Howe's first book of poems, The Good Thief, was selected by Margaret Atwood for the National Poetry Series. Persea Books published the book in 1988, and later that year, it won the Peter Lavan Younger Poet Prize from the Academy of American Poets. Although Howe didn't begin writing poetry seriously until she…

  • Public Works

    How, in summer, a man and woman, as in Paris, embrace under trees, and the leaves and the grass bend back and sweat amends them, in a park where the squirrels eat well, where the bronze horse could heave off its officer. How it is like water, sex in summer. You cover yourself, your leaves…

  • Recessional

    When I think of you, you disappear in stages, As if I were paralyzed below my heart And wore, like a blanket, a thousand pages Of you on my lap, who come apart In the slightest wind, and disperse Like leaves. I trade you for the universe, Which holds me back When I lean over…

  • Before the Beat

    Like that answer written on a trip that after makes no sense, we remember before birth, but cannot force it to the clumsy breath of this wet hurt of a joy we are now. So let that big boy go and find your tribe to ride with. We spilled the apple juice long ago. I…

  • Allison Joseph, Zacharis Award

    We are proud to announce Allison Joseph as the 1992 recipient of the John C. Zacharis First Book Award for her poetry collection, What Keeps Us Here, published by Ampersand Press. The annual $1,500 award — which is named after Emerson College's former president and funded by philanthropist Eugenia Gladstone Vogel — honors the best…