Poetry

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…

set out across the fields anonymous, drawn inward like a sea of dusk beneath the cribbed retreat of sun. Remember us against the vinyl in that summer like an apocalypse across the sheetless rising chipped repeat of artificial light of grocery lists wrung. Last night and last night’s last night you cheat the snow, my…

Halliday’s in Italy and Koch is dead (though I admit Koch never meant much to me). What matters is he made Halliday feel understood in (I imagine) much the way Halliday made me. I read him and knew I was free. A few years later he read me and just often enough responded enthusiastically (all…

Friday night, my divorced brother trying out his new girlfriend on us, the oldies funk band so loud all we can do is dance and wait for a break— she sways, arms tight to her chest, fists shaking imaginary maracas. My brother’s steps have not changed—some vague C & W hip twitch from wife #1….

So hot today I wear my new sandals. It’s been a tough morning at Home Sweet Home, wondering why no one talks about Jesus’ teenage years—was he happy? sad? And why are the steamed tomatoes shelved next to the raisins? Sounds stupid, but I’d like even a glimpse of Plan A. I needed to talk…

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…