Poetry

The job was pushing a rod. Steel rod in a V-channel with a stick. With a stick pushing a rod against a wheel. Which spinning ground the rod. Which screaming made sparks which bit my skin. Pushing a rod with a stick while being bitten by sparks was the job. Which required breath at the…

These cyan-colored snails emerge from the white Umbrian mist with murder on their minds—memories of slow rainy Saturdays—how the city of Firenze looked to Perugino on the day his second son was born—Lord Byron’s lost reflection buried under the pebbles in the springs of Fonti del Clitunno. I feel that snail itching its way across…

I was reading the Hindu epic The Ramayana. It was spring in North Carolina: the birds fabricating their nests while I was dipping myself like a tea bag over and over in my own despair. What I like about The Ramayana is how each character suspects there is more than they know to the story….

Transparent as a think-tank fantasia, my dream of April expands its empire without resentment, dissolving all estrangements into an intimacy that makes a god out of difference, equating Madonna Ciccone’s torment on Biography with Blake’s engravings of the Inferno— an amalgam of awe and abhorrence at times beatifying the damned. Next week the secret life…

A pot found while digging, slipped out of the soil as a fish is deboned. God is said to have formed man as easily, molding him from dirt as on a potter’s wheel, but what men could you find crossing the borax flats that shine whitely, the air thick with salt and residue of rare…

One had feathers like a blood-streaked koi, another a tail of color-coded wires. One was a blackbird stretching orchid wings, another a flicker with a wounded head. All flew like leaves fluttering to escape, bright, circulating in burning air, and all returned when the air cleared. One was a kingfisher trapped in its bower, deep…

I don’t think the Mayflower’s passengers boarded with any inkling they would be revered. We imagine their journey with clean sails and blue sky, and the galley was probably filthy. Meriwether Lewis finally reached the Pacific after writing those dutiful descriptions of routes and rivers and new species, and just carved his name in a…

Recommendation: Pireeni Sundaralingan depicts a straightforward urgency in everything she writes. She is from Sri Lanka, and her poetry captures elements of that country’s ethnic violence and cultural tensions. However, a credit to her and her poetry, she strives for a language that embraces a sober beauty through precision. Maybe the directness in her voice…

Recommendation: Her poetry to me seems quite brilliant. I’ve been reading her recently completed manuscript, Trip Meter, and consider it to be first-rate. How shall I put it—maybe the most forthright thing I can say is that, when it’s published, I’d be honored to write one of the blurbs for its backcover. My blurb would…