Poetry

What did Sinclair Lewis say about sweet potatoes, or rather Upton Sinclair, or red potatoes? Crows. Crows all day. And the river holding on to the mist, sixty watts of sunshine at noon and the smell of cadmium under the bridge, coal yards and dumps, the boat launch south of the locks, fission in a…

Standing off a bit, I watch one of them fly out of its form, so clenched up on its own that it does not understand the wash, the river carved into its underground. When it is here or there, it is always somewhere else, an optic hop away from the housecat moving slowly towards the…

If the dog were a cloud, he could run through blue pastures, and never catch his hair on a fence. He could leap at other clouds and they would not growl or bite. He could retrieve the sun, which would glow in his mouth, and light up all his teeth. And how pleased his mistress…

A little atomic number on the sale rack. Lots of castles. Lots of knives and forks. Lots of closet skeletons. The fitting room flooded with the strands of the score he left on her answering machine. A drive-in movie screen: their cloud-built bed stuffed with opera lens and whatnots. How they loved to Euro the…

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…

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…

Recommendation: What I find unusual in Alissa Valles’s poems is a very strong expression of intellectual passion invested into the historical—or strictly personal—world. Her poetry is coming close to a kind of a “dynamic wisdom” maybe best exemplified in poems like “Two Gods.” I think there’s an exceptional promise in her work, in her spiritual…

Recommendation: I have been enthusiastic about Sharmila Voorakkara’s poetry since the first poem she wrote for my poetry writing class several years ago. From the beginning, her perspectives were strange and compelling, not merely willfully odd, and her language and imagery were original, both wry and brilliantly awry. I was pleased to have my own…