I'm excited to introduce this conversation between Cynthia Good and Nick Courtright, who I've paired because of their shared investment in travel, documentary poetics, and entrepreneurship in literature and the arts. Here, they discuss their latest collections, as well as the intersection of lived experience, craft, and the business of writing. Cynthia Good is an award-winning poet, journalist, and former TV news anchor. She has written six books including Vaccinating Your Child, which won the Georgia Author of the Year award. She has launched two magazines, Atlanta Woman and the nationally distributed PINK magazine for women in business. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals including Adanna Journal, Awakenings, Book of Matches, Brickplight, Bridgewater International Poetry Festival, Cutthroat, Free State Review, Full Bleed, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Hole in the Head Review, Main Street Rag, Maudlin House Review, MudRoom, Outrider Press, OyeDrum Magazine, The Penmen Review, Pensive Journal, Persimmon Tree, Pier-Glass Poetry, Pink Panther Magazine, Poydras, South Shore Review, The Ravens Perch, Reed Magazine, Tall Grass, Terminus Magazine, They Call Us, and Voices de la Luna and Willows Wept Review, Semi-Finalist: The Word Works 2021, among others. Her debut poetry collection is available for pre-order from Finishing Line Press. Nick Courtright is the author of The Forgotten World, Let There Be Light and Punchline, and he serves as the Executive Editor of Atmosphere Press. His poetry has appeared in The Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, Boston Review, The Iowa Review, AGNI, Gulf Coast, and The Southern Review, among dozens of others, and essays and other prose have been published by such places as The Huffington Post, The Best American Poetry, Gothamist, and SPIN Magazine. With a Doctorate in Literature from the University of Texas, Nick lives in Austin with the poet Lisa Mottolo and their children, William and Samuel. Cynthia Good: Why were you moved to focus on place, and what places in particular, since it is a bit mysterious in some of your beautiful poems? Nick Courtright: I was drawn to place because the otherworldliness—and normalcy—of non-America called for a deeper exploration. I’m very aware of how fortunate I am to have seen a lot of the world, and what I found there was not just a bunch of tourist sites, but a reminder that the lives of others are just as rich and nuanced—and perhaps even more so—than ours in America, even though in America we tend to have a rather flat impression of the rest of the world. For example, when I had travel plans to somewhere like Cambodia or Cuba or Kenya, people would often say to me, “be safe,” with the assumption that those places are less safe than America. In many ways, America is more dangerous, but the mentality that the rest of the world is “scary” is something I wanted to push against. It’s only scary because we don’t know it, and this book of poems is my attempt to make it a bit more known, and to turn that judgmental eye... Continue reading

I'm thrilled to introduce this new poem by celebrated writer Shane McCrae. As a longtime admirer of McCrae's work, I never cease to be amazed by his ability to bear the distinctive lineation of Frank O'Hara and the cadences of classic New York School poetry into new and unforeseen sociopolitical territory. Poet Shane McCrae grew up in Texas and California. The first in his family to graduate from college, McCrae earned a BA at Linfield College, an MA at the University of Iowa, an MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a JD at Harvard Law School. McCrae is the author of several poetry collections, including Mule(2011); Blood (2013); The Animal Too Big to Kill (2015); In the Language of My Captor (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), which was a finalist for the National Book Award; and The Gilded Auction Block (2019). His work has also been featured in The Best American Poetry 2010, edited by Amy Gerstler, and his honors include a Whiting Writers’ Award and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. --Kristina Marie Darling A New Poem by Shane McCrae Continue reading

It is a pleasure to introduce this conversation by two outstanding and generous literary citizens: Tina Cane and Rachel Abramowitz. In both writers' bodies of work, we see a poetics powered by community, enriched by conversation and emboldened by dialogue across genres and mediums. Rachel Abramowitz is also the author The Birthday of the Dead, which just launched from Conduit Editions, as well as the chapbooks The Puzzle Monster, winner of the 2021 Tomaž Šalamun prize (forthcoming from Factory Hollow Press in 2022), and Gut Lust, the winner of the 2019 Burnside Review prize (Burnside Review Press, 2020). Her poems and reviews have appeared in Tin House Online, The Threepenny Review, Seneca Review, The Kenyon Review Online, Crazyhorse, Tupelo Quarterly, Prelude, Oxonian Review, POOL, jubilat, Sprung Formal, Transom, Colorado Review, and others. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the University of Oxford, and has taught English Literature at Barnard College in New York. Tina Cane was born in Hell’s Kitchen, NYC in 1969 and grew up in the city’s East and West Village. She attended the University of Vermont, the Sorbonne and completed her master’s degree in French Literature at ​the University of Paris X-Nanterre and Middlebury College. She is the founder and director of Writers-in-the Schools, RI, for which she works as a visiting poet. Over the past twenty-five years, Tina has taught French, English, and creative writing in public and private schools throughout New York City and Rhode Island. Her poems and translations have appeared ​in numerous publications, including Spinning Jenny, The Literary Review, Tupelo Quarterly, The Common, Poem-a-Day. Her work,The Fifth Thought, was the 2008 Other Painters Press chapbook winner. Her books include The Fifth Thought,Dear Elena: Letters for Elena Ferrante, Once More With Feeling, and Body of Work. Tina was the 2016 recipient for the Fellowship Merit Award in Poetry from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. She currently serves as the Poet Laureate of Rhode Island where she lives with her husband and their three children. In 2020, Cane was named a poet laureate fellow with the Academy of American Poets. Tina is also the creator/curator of the distance reading series, ​Poetry is Bread. Alma Presses Play, Tina's debut novel-in-verse for young adults readers, will be released in September 2021 with Penguin/ Random House Books. Tina Cane: There's a poem I keep returning to called "Vantablack" from your new collection, The Birthday of the Dead. It's named for that blackest shade of paint ever made, but manages to encapsulate the book's exploration of how, in your words, "any human interaction" with the natural world "turns out to be devastating in unexpected ways." The thrust of this observation pervades your book, which is a place where "the forest fills and unfills, drops itself down root tubes and turns to dark lace." Where does this vision of our relationship with nature spring from? How would you characterize your relationship with the natural world? Rachel Abramowitz: At the time I wrote the... Continue reading

It's truly an honor to introduce this new work by acclaimed poet Cole Swensen. Here, she offers a complex and gorgeously lyrical phenomenology of perception, deftly interrogating the ways that language shapes one's experience of the senses and the world around us. In Swensen's newest work, the unique artistic opportunities of poetry - performative language, metaphor, and the image - are brought to bear on these philosophical questions with incredible skill. It is the associative logic that Swensen implements that allows her to present inquiries into the nature of language and perception in a visceral way. Indeed, "New Green" involves and implicates the reader in the speaker's efforts to understand - and delineate - a clearer boundary between self and world. This is a stunning addition to an already accomplished body of work. Cole Swensen is the author of seventeen collections of poetry, most recently On Walking On (Nightboat, 2017), Gave (Omnidawn, 2017), and Landscapes on a Train(Nightboat 2015), and a volume of critical essays. Her poetic collections turn around specific research projects, including ones on public parks, visual art, illuminated manuscripts, and ghosts. Her work has won the National Poetry Series, the Iowa Poetry Prize, the San Francisco State Poetry Center Book Award, and the PEN USA Award in Literary Translation. A former Guggenheim Fellow, she is the co-editor of the Norton anthology American Hybrid and the founding editor of La Presse Poetry (www.lapressepoetry.com). She teaches at Brown University. New Green by Cole Swensen What is the unseen, and how do we see it before it emerges? That is the nature of earliest things, and you try to observe what comes first—a blade of grass, a livening of the moss, an outbreak of leaf—looking out the window and then walking outside in search of emergence. It really does have a different color—which is also what’s puzzling your child as she runs out of the house holding up a crayon, asking “What does New Green mean? Haven’t all colors been around forever?” And I think of the translation that I’ve just finished for a catalogue in which the artist, among a list of colors, included verd, which turned out to be old French for vert, and, sure enough, Old English has grene, but despite this clear illustration, the child refuses to believe that it’s possible to invent a new color simply by inventing a new word. Continue reading

In writings on her time as editor of The Dial, Marianne Moore coined the term "conversity" to describe the inherently dialogic nature of poetry. In that spirit, I'm pleased to present the following conversation between two contemporary writers who are both intriguing in their critiques of traditional genre categories: Maya Sonenberg, a masterful storyteller, who frequently places the tools of poetry in the service of narrative, and Beth McDermott, whose ekphrastic poems often apply performative language and lyricism to the task of engaging with, and thinking through, the questions posed by works of visual art. As this conversation unfolds, McDermott and Sonenberg consider such compelling topics as the gender politics of judgment, the relationship between writing and family, and the interplay of innovative writerly technique and the deeply personal. Maya Sonenberg (above left) grew up in New York City and lived in Maine, Connecticut, Rhode Island, California, Oregon, and Paris, France before settling in Seattle, where she teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Washington. Her newest collection of short stories, Bad Mothers, Bad Daughters has received the Sullivan Prize and will be published by the University of Notre Dame press in August 2022. Her previous collections are Cartographies (winner of the Drue Heinz Prize for Literature) and Voices from the Blue Hotel. Other fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Fairy Tale Review, Web Conjunctions, DIAGRAM, New Ohio Review, The Literarian, Hotel Amerika, and numerous other places. Beth McDermott’s poetry appears in Pine Row, Tupelo Quarterly, Terrain.org, and Southern Humanities Review. Reviews and criticism about art and ecology appear in American Book Review, After the Art, Kenyon Review Online, and The Trumpeter. She’s an Assistant Professor of English at the University of St. Francis and recipient of a Distinguished Teaching Award, an Illinois Speaks Micro-Grant, and first place in the Regional Mississippi Valley Poetry Contest. Her first book, Figure 1, just launched from Pine Row Press. Beth McDermott: We both write about parenting. In a couple of my poems, i.e. “Judgment” or “Getting Ready,” I consider what it means to be judged as a parent. I see common feelings among my speakers and your character in “Painting Time,” for example. In that story, written from the second person point of view, we get the partner’s perspective of the “she,” who has spent most of her time as a parent looking for time to paint. How does the choice of that viewpoint speak to what it means to be a “bad mother”? Maya Sonenberg: When I started writing “Painting Time,” I gave myself the challenge of using second person point of view, which I had never really done before, not that type of second person anyway where a narrator addresses one of the characters, rather than one character addressing another. I think I chose to address the husband/father as the “you” for a couple of reasons. The woman in that story is working so hard at being a “good” mother that she fears/feels she’s become a “bad” artist,... Continue reading

Kelly Weber's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Brevity, The Missouri Review, Tupelo Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Cream City Review, and elsewhere. Her work has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize. She holds an MFA from Colorado State University, where she served as an intern with Colorado Review. She lives in Colorado with two rescue cats. More of her work can be found at kellymweber.com. A Conversation with Kelly Weber Emma Bolden: Your debut full-length collection, We Are Changed to Deer at the Broken Place, is forthcoming from Tupelo Press. Can you tell us a bit about it? Kelly Weber: I’m so excited for this collection to be making its way into the world. We Are Changed to Deer at the Broken Place considers asexuality, aromanticism, and the male gaze broadly through the prism of the myth of Artemis and Actaeon. So a lot of the book is about myth-making and finding the lyric space and language for my experience of asexuality and aromanticism. Some of the poems are variations on prose poem sonnet forms in order to consider and question inherited poetic traditions (and assumptions) of eros and its containers. They’re poems that are heavily concerned with place, particularly the kinds of rural areas I grew up in as a queer person. EB: One of the things I admire most about your work is the way that you work with form and structure: prose poems with virgules, lines broken internally with white space, placement on the page. How do you approach form and structure in your work? KW: Thank you so much for saying that! When I approach structure for a poem, part of my process for finding the right form is playing with visual arrangements that excite me. Sometimes a poem that just isn’t “going” in the revision process unlocks when I start pushing it around the page in new ways—the poem begins to “move” and breathe differently and the ideas change when I try out caesura, or shift from traditional lines to a prose poem with virgules, or use any other form idea that I think is fun to play with. The poem may not stay in that form, but I always learn something in the process. Sometimes the key is just trying out different forms to unlock the poem’s rhythm. Form can be a way to find pulse. Changes in punctuation, breath, and visual arrangement on the page can make the small but ultimate difference to surprise me and, I think, surprise the poem out into the open, finally. More experimental forms also feel like less pressure than really traditional-looking sonnets or villanelles, for example. Creating my own form rules clears the room out—so to speak—so it’s just me and the poem learning the dance together. EB: What’s the best and worst advice you’ve been given as a writer? KW: Such a hard question! I think all writing advice I’ve been given comes from a good place, but I ultimately learned a lot by determining which advice... Continue reading

"It has been an honor and a privilege to join in this weeklong celebration of Tupelo Quarterly with The Best American Poetry. Today, I hope you will enjoy this feature of poetry and scholarship by TQ contributor Nick Courtright. As a editor that prides herself on a commitment to rigorous critical discourse and innovative writing, I'm thrilled to offer this conversation across the boundaries of genre and discipline."--Kristina Marie Darling, Editor-in-Chief, Tupelo Press & Tupelo Quarterly. Nick Courtright is the author of The Forgotten World, Let There Be Light, and Punchline, a National Poetry Series finalist. He is the Executive Editor of Atmosphere Press. His poetry has appeared in The Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, Boston Review, The Iowa Review, AGNI, Gulf Coast, and The Southern Review, among dozens of others, and essays and other prose have been published by such places as The Huffington Post, The Best American Poetry, Gothamist, and SPIN Magazine. With a Doctorate in Literature from the University of Texas, he lives in Austin with the poet Lisa Mottolo and their children, William and Samuel. A Conversation with Scholar-Practitioner Nick Courtright Kristina Marie Darling: In addition to your achievements as a poet, you are also a gifted literary critic, with recent essays published or forthcoming in The Laurel Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and more. What has your practice as a literary critic opened up within your poetry? Nick Courtright: I think it’s freed me to be more merciful in terms of what my poetry can mean. My critical approach revolves around the embrace of the most expansive interpretive range possible, one that takes into account the words, the history, the context, the whole bubbling heap of bad or wrong interpretations inflected by one’s own personal biases, etc. Because I take that tack in my critical appraisal of the meanings of others’ poems, I have to be generous in terms of what my own poems can mean. So although at this stage of my poetry career I’ve moved away from vagueness and abstraction, and try to paint very clear images, arguments, and narratives into my poetry, I really love for the overall takeaway of a poem to be ambiguous. I want the poems to be non-committal about whether their speaker is a hero or a villain, for example. KMD: In the spirit of the excerpt featured here, entitled “The Ecstasy of Influence,” I’d love to hear more about your literary and artistic influences. What poets shaped your approach to craft and thematics? NC: My earlier influences were of the Bidart, Blake, Bly, Lorca angle, with a love for odd images and confounding syntax and a pursuit of the ineffable. And in my latest poetry collection The Forgotten World I was thinking a lot about Kaveh Akbar and Ocean Vuong and others who just write with aching beauty about difficult personal journeys. But lately I’ve found myself most drawn to narrative directness and the comic, so I’ve been reading more George Bilgere, Mary Biddinger, Anders Carson Wee, and Emilia Phillips,... Continue reading

Hasanthika Sirisena work has been anthologized in This is the Place (Seal Press, 2017), in Every Day People: The Color of Life(Atria Books, 2018), and twice named a notable story by Best American Short Stories. She has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo and is a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award recipient. She is currently faculty at the Vermont College of Fine Arts and Susquehanna University and she is acting editor at West Branch magazine. Her books include the short story collection The Other One (University of Massachusetts Press, 2016) and the forthcoming essay collection Dark Tourist (Mad Creek Books/Ohio State University 2021). Kristina Marie Darling: You are an accomplished cross-disciplinary practitioner, whose work exists in spite of and beyond the categories of writing and art. How did you first become interested in creating cross-disciplinary work? Hasanthika Sirisena: I started drawing when I was very young. I never thought of myself as very smart and I struggled with English and with writing. Drawing allowed me to have confidence and gave me a means of articulating myself. I went on to study fine art at the Art Institute of Chicago and, in fact, have a BFA so I have a long and deep training in visual media. I really only started writing in my early thirties and for a little while I stopped drawing. Cross-disciplinary and hybrid work has allowed me to merge these two identities. KMD: Tell me some of the ways that cross-disciplinary work is or can be politically charged. HS: Cross-disciplinary work often asks us to think about and rethink our assumptions of form. For example, I’m currently reading Rosanna Bruno and Anne Carson’s The Trojan Woman, A Comic. I was delighted when the book arrived and was the size and heft of a children’s book. The translation itself rethinks what it means to actually make a translation. The opening references James Baldwin and Joan Didion (and probably a few other writers I missed.) I can’t read Greek but I don’t think I’m going out on a limb by assuming that the original play doesn’t allude to Baldwin much less quote Didion. The playfulness here—with the boundaries and capaciousness of language and intent—force me to confront how we decide who gets to make art and the audiences they make art for. But it’s the images themselves that are extraordinary. The images stand in for the actor and ask us to meditate on what an illustration—either drawn or acted—actually is. How does an illustration contain force and agency? All this for a work that is also a profoundly antiwar message. Honestly, just asking us to stop and think and deliberate is a political act. KMD: I’d love to hear about one piece from TQ that you selected or curated that stayed with you. What made it memorable? HS: Well, I wasn’t the one who selected Sarah Minor’s “A Poetry Comic” in Issue 25 but I’m deeply in love with it. Everything is so expertly rendered, from the quality,... Continue reading

"It is an honor and privilege to celebrate Tupelo Quarterly with The Best American Poetry, and to highlight some of our extraordinary contributors. Please enjoy this feature on poet and visual artist Jenny Grassl, whose interdisciplinary practice reflects TQ's commitment to bridging the gap between literature and the fine arts."--Kristina Marie Darling, Editor-in-Chief, Tupelo Press & Tupelo Quarterly Jenny Grassl's poems have appeared in The Boston Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Laurel Review, Green Mountains Review, The Massachusetts Review, Ocean State Review, Lana Turner, Bennington Review, and other journals. Her work was published in a National Poetry Month feature of Iowa Review. Her manuscript DEER WOMAN IN THE DINING ROOM was selected as a runner-up for the Tupelo Press July open reading in 2021. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A Conversation with Poet & Visual Artist Jenny Grassl Kristina Marie Darling: The poems featured here use the page as a canvas, a visual field. In a world of left-margined poems, I find this approach bold, effective, and refreshing. What advice do you have for poets who hesitate or struggle to take risks with form, to use white space as a unit of composition? Jenny Grassl: This is a great topic. I would say start by realizing that a block of left-margined poem stanzas or text is like a monument in a landscape. Often, its effect is to overpower that landscape, and overcome any evidence of the void. A poem that uses the whole page IS the landscape, and engages with the void. Get wandering, and start the journey. Push form to push content. Of course some poems work best in the traditional way. There exist great experiments with form in poetry. I am not sure how they lost relevance to so many of today's poets. I am thinking of Ted Berrigan, Clark Coolidge, John Ashbery, Tom Clark with Lewis Warsh, and Anne Waldman, among others. I was exposed to their work early on, and assumed I had permission to compose a page creatively. Lewis was my earliest mentor. KMD: In addition to your achievements as a poet, you are also known as a visual artist. What has your cross-disciplinary practice, and your background in the fine arts, opened up within your poetry? JG: In visual art, working with form/content tension while seeking beauty, constantly re-defines beauty. This has had real consequences for my poetry. Many issues are the same in both poetry and art: gesture, conflict, philosophy, story, emotion, social history, image, and patterning. Not least is celebrating the medium. Poetry that foregrounds language functions for me the way painterly painting does. However, I do not mean the conceptual language of Language poets. I prefer something more sensual. The medium reveals content, and is not subservient to it. Collage and layering as expressions of language have become more important in my poetry through visual work. And, indeed, the image—I build my poems with images. KMD: Tell me about your text-based visual artworks and collages. JG: In digital collages, I work back and... Continue reading

"It is an honor and privilege to celebrate Tupelo Quarterly at The Best American Poetry and spotlight some of our extraordinary contributors. Please enjoy this interview with Cynthia Dewi Oka, curated by TQ Managing Editor Wendy Chen".--Kristina Marie Darling, Editor-in-Chief, Tupelo Press & Tupelo Quarterly Originally from Bali, Indonesia, Cynthia Dewi Oka is the author of Fire Is Not a Country (2021) and Salvage (2017) from Northwestern University Press, and Nomad of Salt and Hard Water (2016) from Thread Makes Blanket Press. A recipient of the Amy Clampitt Residency, Tupelo Quarterly Poetry Prize, and the Leeway Transformation Award, her poetry has appeared in The Atlantic, POETRY, Academy of American Poets, Poetry Society of America, Hyperallergic, Guernica, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her experimental poem, Future Revisions, was exhibited at the Rail Park billboard in Philadelphia in summer 2021. An alumnus of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, she has taught creative writing at Bryn Mawr College, New Mexico State University, Blue Stoop, and Voices of Our Nations (VONA). For fifteen years, Cynthia worked as an organizer, trainer, and fundraiser in social movements for gender, racial, economic, and migrant justice. Her fourth poetry collection, A Tinderbox in Three Acts, is a Blessing the Boats Selection chosen by Aracelis Girmay and is forthcoming in fall 2022 from BOA Editions. Wendy Chen: Congratulations on the upcoming publication of your fourth poetry collection A Tinderbox in Three Acts this fall as the next BOA Blessing the Boats Selections title! Has the way you put together poetry collections changed over the years? Cynthia Dewi Oka: Thank you so much! I think the way I put together collections has changed from project to project, depending on the conditions of my writing life. Until very recently, I’ve always had to write around my primary responsibilities as a working mother. For instance, the poems in both Nomad of Salt and Hard Water (Dinah Press, 2012; revised edition, Thread Makes Blanket, 2016) and Salvage (Northwestern University Press, 2017) were written in pre-dawn hours, which were the only time I could be alone and focus on poetry without interruption. With Fire Is Not a Country (Northwestern University Press, 2021), I had a bit more spaciousness because my son was older, and I could enforce fiercer boundaries around my writing time as an MFA candidate at Warren Wilson College. I still had to work full time to support my family but at least I didn’t have to worry about debt because the program fully funded my studies with the Holden Fellowship. That was such a gift. I also researched and completed the first draft of A Tinderbox in Three Acts during that period. WC: Are there any particularly formative experiences to your identity as a writer? CDO: Teaching myself English by trial-and-error as a ten-year-old because the ESL program at my new school in Canada could not accommodate an Indonesian speaker was the most formative experience for me as a writer. I basically read everything in the school library with the... Continue reading

Brenna Womer is a prose writer and poet in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and an MFA candidate at Northern Michigan University, where she teaches creative writing, literature, and composition as well as serves as an associate editor of Passages North. Her work has appeared in The Normal School, Indiana Review, DIAGRAM, Pleiades, and elsewhere, and she is the author of honeypot (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019) and Atypical Cells of Undetermined Significance (C&R Press, 2018). ___________________________________________________ Artist’s Statement I think utilizing the craft of textual difficulty, in its limitless forms, is essential for contemporary poets and prose writers. Obviously, stream-of-consciousness has been a part of the mainstream for some time now and paved the way for writers like myself who intend for the aesthetics of some pieces to weigh as heavily as the text itself. In my piece “Hypochondria, or The Disease,” I rely on the difficulty of the formatting to evoke a sense of anxiety in the reader as they decipher some of my personal experiences with debilitating mental illness; the reader has to work a bit harder for the narrative. I’ve been told the piece is frustrating and exhausting, which isn’t language typically attributed to successful work, but in the case of this particular piece as well as some of my other creative nonfiction and poetry, it’s exactly the point. I like to think of it as an exercise in empathy. ____________________________________________________ A Folio of New Writing by Brenna Womer company put on a show for me he asks while I ride on top and wonder what it is he thinks I’m doing now does he think I mash my own breasts and pinch nipples hard and red and raw at home alone with my dogs watching he asks tell me what you really want tell me where you want it but I want to go back to the couch and eat my cold bagel but I know he has to come before I get my everything toasted with plain cream cheese ______________________________________ tenure I trade my body for good company or company more often than not but professor doesn’t see me in the hallway copy room elevator parking lot doesn’t see me if my tit’s not in his mouth when his red stag isn’t dribble down my chin and sticky to the leather of his couch like my grandparents’ couch the family I don’t call family because they only love me during second service vacation bible school bless this food and the women who prepared it a family by any other name is a sexual history an untethered novelty so I ask him about his parents but of course they’re dead of course because professor is so many years of being a white man in this world in this grad-student pussy is sixty-five years of asking let’s go to the bedroom and I am forty fewer of okay ___________________________________ slow burn my age always closer to the scotch in his glass we slow-dance next to the pool table he asks... Continue reading

Born and raised in the Bronx, poet Laurie Sheck was educated at the University of Iowa. She has published several collections of poetry, including Captivity (2007); The Willow Grove (1996), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and Amaranth (1981). Her poems often use myths as frames within which to explore ideas of motion and stillness, consciousness and the body. In a 2002 interview, speaking to the attentiveness, rather than narrative, that drives her work, Sheck noted, “if you create a world on the page in which things that seem not to hold together can interact with each other, they can hold, and part of what’s holding, part of what’s interesting, is the way that things don’t directly hook up.” Her 500-page hybrid novel, A Monster’s Notes (2009), uses prose fragments and deletions, letters, and embedded texts to reimagine the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. “As Sheck demonstrates, the lyric essay is a kind of Frankenstein's monster, equipped with parts sliced out of others, stitched up with genius and white space,” observes novelist and editor Ed Park in a review for the Los Angeles Times. Sheck’s honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the New Jersey State Council for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Her poems have won several Pushcart Prizes and have been included in Best American Poetry. Sheck edited the anthology Poem a Day, Volume 2 (2003). Sheck has taught at Princeton University and the New School. She lives in New York City. _________________________________________ On Textual Difficulty Toward the end of Dostoevsky’s great novel, The Idiot, there is a scene of astonishing and transgressive beauty—the frightened, epileptic Prince Myshkin holds the murderer Rogozhin in his arms, stroking and comforting him, as they pass the night only a few feet from the bed where Rogozhin has left Nastasya’s dead body. Myshkin is horrified by Rogozhin, so much so that after that night he will never speak again. But he understands in the deepest parts of his being that if he turns from Rogozhin he is turning from everything human, suffering, radiant, ambiguous, complex. What is termed “textual difficulty” seems to me nothing less than the attempt to be faithful to the ambiguities, extremities, and textures of experience and of language itself. What Dostoevsky knew: nothing is more radical, more strange, than reality. Facts are astonishments. The mind seeks to briefly capture and wonder at, interrogate, what it senses. Angles into the real. A fragility of holding. Unsettled. Volatile. Unstable. “The artist knows there is nothing stable under heaven.” (James Baldwin). I am moved by the unstable text. The precarious, the marginal, the de-centered, is also strong. ___________________________________________ An Introductory Note The hybrid works I have been writing over the past decade involve interactions with one or two source texts and a large body of factual material. A Monster’s Notes involves itself with Frankenstein, the Shelleys, The Dream of the Red Chamber, and facts from a wide... Continue reading

Elizabeth Powell is the author of The Republic of Self, a New Issue First Book Prize winner, selected by C.K. Williams. Her second book of poems, Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter: Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances was a 2016 New Yorker Books We Love, a Small Press Best Seller, and won the 2015 Anhinga Robert Dana Prize, selected by Maureen Seaton. Her novel Concerning the Holy Ghost’s Interpretation of JCrew Catalogues, will be released in Spring 2019. Her work has appeared in the Pushcart Prize Anthology 2013, Ecotone, The Colorado Review, The Cortland Review, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Sugarhouse Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She is Editor of Green Mountains Review, and Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Johnson State College. She also serves on the faculty of the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Omaha. A Process Note All poetry is physics, is a theology of being and thingyness, is transformative narrative. I am attracted to hybrid form as a way to push the imagination into new ways of thinking and seeing. The imagination is what helps to express what is difficult or unseen and begin to understand how its creative stance can revolt against status quo of American consumerism. There is a strong link between social justice and experimental prose and the hybrid lyric essay/poem because the power of the imaginative/spiritual/dream propulsion of writing is beginning to move us away from the old ways of seeing that no longer serve. The creative force is that which has the power to free. My lyric hybrid novel, “Concerning the Holy Ghost’s Interpretation of JCrew Catalogues” explores how that redemptive idea interfaces with and investigates the consumerism and desire so rampant in American culture. I employ a pastiche of forms from disparate places such as a JCrew catalogue to the Book of Common Prayer. The book looks, in part, at the intersections of conservative evangelical misogyny, the new cult of domesticity (that is fashioned, in part, out of the idea of retro), and the social drive of the American advertisement and consumer system of belief. My book thinks about creative force as prophecy, as the muse of history, as spiritual guide, as metaphor, as structural device, and, ultimately, as resistance. __________________________________________________ A Folio of New Writing by Elizabeth Powell AUTOCORRECTING THE LYRIC I I keep autocorrecting myself. I don’t want to autocorrect myself. I autocorrect when I don’t want to autocorrect. It disturbs the fusion of my interior monologue. I cannot keep up with how fast things are changing. If I use autocorrect I am more suitable for you to see. I am dressed. I am not as naked as my fast typing might insist. Autocorrection is a kind of conspiracy theory of reality based on the probability of words and un-nimble fingers. Thought is more easily rendered when you autocorrect, so it is said. But I know I am made from a God that makes homemade bread in the desert, even if He doesn’t have... Continue reading

Veronica Golos is the author of three poetry books, Rootwork: Lost Writings of John Brown and Mary Day Brown (3: A Taos Press), Vocabulary of Silence (Red Hen Press, 2011), winner of the 2011 New Mexico Book Award, poems from which are translated into Arabic by poet Nizar Sartawi, and A Bell Buried Deep (Storyline Press, 2004), co-winner of the 16th Annual Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize, nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Edward Hirsch, and adapted for stage and performed at Claremont School of Theology, Claremont, CA. Golos has lectured at Columbia University’s Teacher’s College, Hunter College, Julliard School of Music, Regis University, University of New Mexico, Dine Technical College, Kansas State University, and Colorado State University; she is co-editor of the Taos Journal of International Poetry & Art, former Poetry Editor for the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, and core faculty at Tupelo Press's Writers Conferences. She lives in Taos, New Mexico with her husband, David Pérez. ____________________________________ Artist Statement What is "difficulty" in a poem? And to whom is it difficult? And why? The debates over what is Feminist poetry for example, underscore a question: Is there a feminine voice? And if so, is it one relegated only to the female? IN my own work, I have the female voice, that is, poems clearly in the voice of a women, to be one that may be, I hope, perceived as universal, as well as particular. I model this thinking based on comments made by Toni Morrison. In my newest collection, GIRL, I find that both the text, content, and texture of the poems create in many readers a disturbance. That creates both link and space between the poet and the reader. It creates movement. Ultimately, what we mean to do, I think, is the "break the ice" that surrounds the reader, and, the poet. ____________________________________ Poem because her mother inscribes an open=eyed Braille with her slap slap slap the girl never cries refusing her secret to her chest like the Spartan boy and his fox inside her in the hold of her mute never the blue-black of the slap face arms her back invisible that ink ^^^ sometimes in the summer she heard singing dense music peeling from the bark of trees who sang? wind like weeping. whose? a wild sound roiling into the lovely ears of the girl: "live, yes, live." ^^^ The dark god has stuffed my mouth with silk -- Vikas Menon ^^^ now step into the room of the massive bed white flung and twisted sheets and the mother's tangle of black hair and her necklace O terrible one the spiked halo of blue around her head a shimmer a trace of voices drugged an envelope of black/white/black/white iwanttodieiwanttodieiwanttodie small crickets in a jar, a bow string snapping against wind the scar unraveling itself... ^^^ If you, Girl, do not rise out of yourself this room you will swallow such hunger you have never known because the law of blessings is also the... Continue reading

Karla Kelsey is the author of four books: Knowledge Forms the Aviary; Iteration Nets; A Conjoined Book; and Of Sphere. With Aaron McCollough she edits Split-Level Texts and with Poupeh Missaghi she edits Matters of Feminist Practice. Her website is www.karlakelsey.com. ______________________________________ Difficulty: A Spillage To honor being’s complexity requires, of necessity, a fray along the edges of the known, a jostling of the lens of representation, a discharge of difficulty. Difficulty: resistance, a refusal to compress or cauterize excess according to received form. Or according to received relation, knowledge, sensation, thought, utterance. Because in what overflows the easily recognizable body, object of thought or material we find vivacity, living tissue, incandescence powering syllable, word, sentence, line, text. And thus to reinvent what has been given, to make and be made new, to bathe in the thrill of what transpires beyond ease. _______________________________________ A Folio of Poems by Karla Kelsey THRALL Enthralled to the buzz of neon we yield to instruction we stare at the gallery’s sole object a red square of light projected on the wall source invisible. We yield, I yield inhaling 1-2-3-4-5 exhaling 1-2-3-4- 5 mind sky-blank and you, you stand beside me a solid object, steadfast in Yves Klein Blue. If you yield I do not know because surrender is individual is sole my body, my I, my mind, my me abandoned to mystic red, scarlet red, coquelicot red and I cock-lee-co I red-corn-rose I wild-poppy-poppy, do you pulse with this, you, next to me, you blue, you International Klein Blue? The square pulses me poppy source invisible, with the same questionable status of objects revealed many years ago by a boardwalk psychic off-season air crystalizing just before snow. Holding up the nine of swords she had said this is you as you believe yourself to be, facedown and pierced by these swords. But notice the flat sea, the rising sun and so pull will you pull-pull who will pull-pull tucking a greasy strand of hair under a purple turban, yes, she wore a purple satin turban those swords from your back? Whetted blades hilts of hammered gold the psychic said cigarette, sweatshirt with rhinestone-studded cat my time us nearly up they need to come out. The cat’s emerald eyes flash in candle light. Petals crumple in the bud then bloom, showy before flattening and radiate out a perfect red disk before falling away. ____________________________________________ The swords had needed, I need, needed need mystic scarlet coquelicot red corn roses coursing through my body seeding, blooming, tissue-heads shuddering in wind. I need because under fabrics and plastics we are exposed, vulnerable to impression and it is exhausting this pretense otherwise, exhausting to wake early, make coffee, shower, dress advance into the day with formal hello and yesyes as if the moment wasn’t all around us vibrating green and shimmering and spitting gravel like sparks, like stars. As if we didn’t ourselves vibrate star spark. And after noon the vibration becomes inner violin, tremolo up to a high... Continue reading

VI KHI NAO is the author of Sheep Machine (Black Sun Lit, 2018) and Umbilical Hospital (Press 1913, 2017), and of the short stories collection, A Brief Alphabet of Torture, which won FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize in 2016, the novel, Fish in Exile (Coffee House Press, 2016), and the poetry collection, The Old Philosopher, which won the Nightboat Books Prize for Poetry in 2014. Her work includes poetry, fiction, film and cross-genre collaboration. Her stories, poems, and drawings have appeared in NOON, Ploughshares, Black Warrior Review and BOMB, among others. She holds an MFA in fiction from Brown University. ________________________________________ On Textual Difficulty Textual difficulty allows me to take wit to the next level of the linguistic playing field. Textual difficulty can also make one’s work more disruptive and when done right, more electrifying and sharp. I love and I try to condition the materiality of humanity’s mundane emotions so they align homosexually with my love affair with tenderness. Sometimes they express themselves non-linearly, awkwardly, and playfully on the page and I let them be so. They may look difficult, but they are not really. Humor is important to me. No one in the heteronormative culture wants amnesia, but amnesia exists when obvious connections appear to be absence, thus provoking humor. More known for my Sapphic writing, some of these poems here take a homosexual detour, provoking some comedic heterosexuality that resembles more loosely to a lemonade stand. This is where sometimes my writing stands: at the intersection between amnesia & wit. _______________________________________ A Folio of Poems by Vi Khi Nao G O O D M A R R I A G E S S H O U L D L I V E O N I C E Slender glacier teases the innocent husband To hand over his wife, the ice tray. The icy husband resists Of course, he resists The wife, divided and compartmentalized Sometimes the husband notices a pool by his side Love is confusing: indeed, when husband can't gather wife together On Sunday and on thirsty days Husband places three quarters of wife in a glass No one believes in singing with divided tears A choir is required, and then a drink to quench the thirst of voices Husband can't believe that wife Can hold a mosquito that long He can brush away her subconscious By draining her of her liquid free will Sometimes volition doesn't belong to husband entirely Sometimes wife can be thick, like jello Even solid objects can be unfaithful. _______________________________________________ T R A N S C R I P T S A F T E R E M P T I N E S S : O N I N C U B A T I O N A N D R A P T U R E [i] This sparkle, after the great forfeiture, fathered vacuity. Her mounting nerves at a loss. After the fright, seizure in prolonged tenderness. Our desires—she clamps in her private closet for me. Below... Continue reading

Allison Benis White is the author of Please Bury Me in This, winner of the Rilke Prize and a Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award, and Small Porcelain Head, selected by Claudia Rankine for the Levis Prize in Poetry. Her first book, Self-Portrait with Crayon, received the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, 2017 Pushcart Prize XLI: Best of the Small Presses, and elsewhere. Her next book, The Wendys, is forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2020. She teaches at the University of California, Riverside. _____________________________________ On the Aesthetics of Textual Difficulty In her introduction to her novel Sula, Toni Morrison writes, “Outlaw women are fascinating—not always for their behavior, but because historically women are seen as naturally disruptive and their status is an illegal one from birth if it is not under the rule of men.” To be an “outlaw woman” on the page, to create a disruptive, ungovernable, or unclassifiable text, is vital to my poetics, as it serves to ensure an intellectual and aesthetic freedom outside the binary, the linear, the traditional. “The duty of the writer,” Solmaz Sharif writes, “is to remind us that we die. And that we aren’t dead yet.” This is a tall order, which often requires a new kind of language, syntax, form, and/or approach. The outlaw or difficult text asks the reader to give themselves briefly to an unfamiliar world, to a particular mouth and mind, to another human being who will die but is not dead yet. ______________________________________ A Folio of Poems by Allison Benis White DARLING Come back, Wendy, Wendy, Wendy. —J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan ________________________________________ “And Wendy fluttered to the ground with an arrow in her breast.” Maybe this is the dream of the dead bathed in milk— so many red feathers in my mind. I remember being alive as a child—on a towel in the grass, from a white plastic kettle, I poured air into a cup, two cups. What else still but to imagine heat, sugar, death. We drank nothing and it was good. ___________________________________________ “‘A lady to take care of us at last,’ said one of the twins, ‘and you have killed her.’” Smoothing the brain, holding a knife to build another mother. Like a house in the trees, I wanted to believe in God to be safe and have somewhere to go. We are all the same and inconsolable, legs twitching during the nightmare. Please wake me up, press one finger between my eyes like a doorbell. __________________________________________ “Perhaps she is frightened at being dead.” Perhaps the cry, the electricity before the mouth goes black, glossy, and hollow. Perhaps all singing aspires to silence (I have nothing left to say), to burn down the house where the song began. Perhaps the sizzle in the teeth, the string of smoke rising from the lips, a hiss of opera, the last note (glittering) sung but still in the air, half-charred, half-disappearing.... Continue reading

Julia Story​ is the author of ​Post Moxie​ (Sarabande Books), the chapbook ​The Trapdoor​ (dancing girl press), and the chapbook ​Julie the Astonishing​ (forthcoming in March 2019 from Sixth Finch Books). She is a 2016 recipient of a Pushcart Prize and her recent work can be read in ​Sixth Finch, Tinderbox​, and ​Tupelo Quarterly​. She is a Midwesterner who now resides in Massachusetts. ________________________________________ A Brief Statement about Textual Difficulty The poems I am working on now are based on the life of Christina the Astonishing, the 12th-century saint who came back to life at her own funeral and then spent the rest of her days living in trees and towers, as she had rejected heaven and had chosen instead to return to earth for a life of suffering. As I write these poems, some of which are her (the “her” is a character called Julie rather than Christina) letters to Jesus about her chosen life on earth, I find them getting smaller and smaller--the poems themselves are small, but the images too diminish as Julie spends her life erasing herself, or as already erased. Living on the edges of things and people, her experiences (and even her prayers) can be best documented in fragments. _________________________________________ A Folio of Poems by Julia Story Poems from ​Julie the Astonishing How She Would Return from the Dead. The body brought out like empty wood, silent as a dark whale in dark water. The body a citadel in trees: getting there was land-swimming, pushing aside loneliness, a white man in rubber boots and all his little dogs, the sun flashing in and out like god’s face upon the water before the invention of cardboard and radio transmissions. And then the second before she knew she was going to give it all up— everything, all of it, until she was walking down the road in the dark with lungs full of the scattered, old-fashioned promises of beginning again—the house of her body would light up, the feet marching as they had been instructed to do. ________________________________ My fugue state, but brittle. Pieces of me broke off, each one a little you. That night we washed our socks together in the hotel sink then watched an old Murder She Wrote.​ A blank face as white as breaths on the screen. I wept because I knew it was my face. Then together we went into the painting of the ocean. _______________________________ We approach the defunct nudist colony. Worn chorus of evening doves, no naked folks. Every moment an ossuary. I’m a body. You are dead like the invisible nudes. But you walk with me. The moon mothered in clouds. ______________________________ As you know, I am no one’s bride. And yet I belong to you and you are like me, a suit of armor made of mercury. The creatures lilt and gambol when they sense our hovering. I am a wraparound porch bound to my own heart and you an afternoon filled with street corners. _________________________________ The... Continue reading

A Guggenheim fellow, Terese Svoboda is most recently the author of Professor Harriman's Steam Air-Ship, her seventh book of poetry, and Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet. She has also published six novels, a memoir, and a book of translations from Nuer, a South Sudanese language. Great American Desert, a book of stories, is forthcoming March 2019. _________________________________ A Process Note I don't see my poetry as difficult, I see it as playful. The mind wants to play. It wants, in its aesthetic experience, to return to a work of art and retrieve something more from it at every contact. Otherwise it will discard that glittering toy, bored. I'm currently playing with plays, getting on and off the stage of poetry. I'm also interested in technical language, and its poetics. Everything has already been written – or else nothing has been written, each moment its own possible play of sound and sense. _________________________________ On the Aesthetics of Textual Difficulty Poetry that requires interpretation is perhaps a show of dominance: you have to know so much in order to appreciate my work, e.g., Eliot and Pound. Enter Hope Mirrlees, her long poem “Paris” published by Virginia Woolf four years before “The Wasteland,” critiqued by TLS as “spluttering and incoherent statement displayed with various tricks of type...It is certainly not a “Poem.” Verlaine’s bed-time…Alchemy Absynthe, Algerian tobacco, Talk, talk, talk, Manuring the white violets of the moon. Here was a woman who knew six languages by the time she was twenty, including Zulu, friend of Stein, Woolf, Bertrand Russell, and of course Eliot, and she lived with a classics scholar. She was not lacking in cultural references. More contemporary evidence of different political and aesthetic pressures that have affected what is considered acceptable as experiment is the erasure of radical poetry of the 20s and 30s, with the conservative 50's and 60's emphasis on sunsets and in formal structure. _________________________________________ A Folio of Poems by Terese Svoboda Out of Ringing Ears Renegade automated car says it can get us back [automated voice: get us back] Where? Slip of paper crushed still warm thigh-curved from its sleep-upon says Called Forth ring ring no sympathy the better the sooner get back Whose renegade scalp do you see taken in a world of get back? The tonic someone (No, we have not met) the invisible people on stage clothes on hangers the gin [the automated voice: get back] well-dressed vs. ill-dressed she said and Not this time beat time [schottische] slow polka to you and over the table, the bedspread under which a house hides the chair-rung entrance and the costume I wore her clothes all my life even now her blouse curses me from the closet Pretend! Limp possum at the vet's The chorus needs feeding The chorus has broken the toilet The chorus on its hind legs The chorus, its back to Greece Water deliciously advances voices over it [stage mis-direction] under it A canon signals The End... Continue reading

Traci Brimhall is the author of three collections of poetry: Saudade (Copper Canyon Press), Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Norton), and Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press). Her next collection, a hybrid of essays and poems, Come the Slumberless from the Land of Nod is forthcoming from Copper Canyon in 2020. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Slate, The Believer, The New Republic, Orion, and Best American Poetry 2013 & 2014. She’s received a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and is currently an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Kansas State University. A Process Note The selection below is from my most recent collection, Saudade (Copper Canyon, 2017). They are verse plays spoken by a chorus of ageless girls and appear spread out in the book across multiple personas. They’re supposed to function sort of like a Greek chorus and some of them were once written as poems in a single voice but got broken into this community voice. I’m interested in the ways oral storytelling are narratives that can be reshaped or lost and how poetry is often so focused on the singular “I”. My books so often engage the mythic, and myths seem to me to be collaboratively composed as allegories for the social and cultural moment. Formally, I think it’s difficult only in that it is unexpected. And because it is formally odd, I try and make its content a bit more clear at times. Although I want to challenge a reader at times, I also want to be generous with them. I love them, though it’s fair to say my love isn’t always easy. The form also allows me a different form of maximalism. In workshops, rejections, and reviews of my books I’ve been criticized for being, essentially, too much. I know I’m a poet (and person) of excess. The verse play lets me take up lots of visual space and extend the line beyond even the lengths I usually allow myself. I think female poets have traditionally been celebrated for being concise and controlled, and I feel downright naughty for trying to spread across both margins. _________________________________________________ In Which the Chorus Describes Cafuné on the Eve of the Passion Maria Helena: The night in costumes, in church bells, in pews sucking on free salted caramels. Maria Thereza: In the general’s breath before he pinches the child's jaw open and spits in her mouth. Maria Helena: We did nothing to stop it. Why would we? We only witness, record, recite. Maria Thereza: Besides, no one else tried to stop history from making itself on stage. Everyone fantasized a different present. Maria de Lourdes: In the pews, the unrepentant traced their hands onto hymnal pages. Behind the curtain, the toothless, the leprous, burying themselves in scherzo and nude boas. Maria Thereza: Jesus makes it to stage but forgets his lines, the new Passion simmers in the journalist, the priest, the poet watching the dictator's parade from an unlit room, composing meager epics... Continue reading

Adeeba Shahid Talukder is a Pakistani American poet, singer, and translator of Urdu and Persian poetry. She is the author of What Is Not Beautiful (Glass Poetry Press, 2018) and her book Shahr-e-jaanaan: The City of the Beloved, forthcoming through Tupelo Press, is a winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize. Adeeba holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan and is a Poets House 2017 Emerging Poets Fellow. Artist’s Statement As a Pakistani-American and neurodiverse poet, I am, at different times, both included in and excluded from my understanding of Self. My own thoughts elude me, though I have spent many years scrutinizing and pulling at their threads. My work resides in the Urdu poetic tradition but in the English language. My poems are still trying to understand themselves. So naturally, I have received criticism for my poems’ lack of “access.” It is the curse of being “other”— a rejection by those who hold power, but also their impatient curiosity. To understand the perversity of many readers’ obsession with access, consider predominant Western attitudes towards Eastern countries, then consider, for instance, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, who painted his imaginings of undressed Muslim women in The Turkish Bath (1862). From this dimension, the idea of access is vaguely colonialist and orientalist, where reading a poem becomes an act of conquest, and the intent goes from honest engagement to intellectual domination. When the reader begins to feel themselves deficient in this regard, it becomes a “sour grapes” situation, where the inaccessibility of a poem proves it lesser. What if we were to interrogate our motives behind reading poetry? To quell the desire for control and humble ourselves before each poem? What if we were to restrain ourselves from “[tying] a poem to a chair with rope/ and [torturing] a confession out of it”? Subh-e-firaaq: Morning of Separation You’re a saint, the mountain carver told the lonely Shireen. More even than stone. He carved for her, almost a stream of milk. Then threw himself off. Fell, his limbs with the leaves he clutched. _______________________________________ Exotica: Three Poems Ambrosia He is a glass cup in her hands; she pours wine, honey, and lime- light. A thing of beauty; Conquest he steals a glance or two, begins to stare— she is the shape of a woman. His eyes are steel. She blushes. He moves closer, demands her secrets. Domination A cure for lust. _________________________________________ On Beauty When I was 19, I trembled to meet men’s eyes. Scarf, burqa, black eyeliner. I was more than Muslim, more than beautiful, more than sexual. They wanted to know what they could not see. ~ ~ The cruel beloved of Urdu poetry slays her lovers with glances, leaves them to languish, rubbing their foreheads in her doorstep’s dust. In this intricacy is power: I cannot lift a suitcase, which means I will never have to. ~ ~ James once wrote me poems as Majnoon, as the nightingale, as the prey. I was engaged. Together, we witnessed the snow... Continue reading

Jennifer Minniti- Shippey is the Managing Editor of Poetry International literary magazine, Director of Poetic Youth programs, and a lecturer at San Diego State University. Her most recent collection of poetry, After the Tour, is available now from Calypso Editions, and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Salamander, Spillway Journal, Cider Press Review, and others. Visit jennyminnitishippey.com for more. A Process Note I’m interested in private vocabularies, private languages at work in lyric poems. There is, in the particularity of image, an assertion of individuality: only this speaker could have made the images of this poem; what emotions you draw from the arrangement of images are yours. I’m also fascinated by how pursuing a sound through a poem can add energy, mystery. When a sequence of sounds “makes sense” to me, I’m generally inclined to leave it, even if it creates unlikely connections between images or narrative points. I haven’t thought of this as “difficulty” before, but I can see the ways it asks the reader to be involved in the meaning-making of a poem. I see also how important it is to me to use my own, particular, private language in the writing of these pieces. * Last Days of June A whole sun-skinned nation later and I am on my knees in the trolley, the trolley south bound, everything dark and rattling— June in this country comes jacarandad and sky-bruised—and me wailing hallelujah quite silently, good-bye brave ponies grazing in the green wind, good- bye thin socks abandoned to the soft mercies of rain, good-bye plastic peonies on the high heels of happiness. I am trying, just try ing to love this again, my life. * Questions for Adam What is love to you: the walls, beyond the walls, the garden, beyond the garden, the alley— what of the words you made, that avocado pitted, that dog wriggling on the carpet, that poetic form, shorelines unmourned, in what bright east heaving ocean you buried your feet— wanderer, o wanderer, you ribless, you gutted, you black-haired belovéd first, what of ash stockpiled in the sideroom, what of our mother dust, our Juliet balcony, our aloe vera, bright green walls and our red bookcase— what is love to your black-penned vision made in the shape of a god, or some kind of cloud, cumulous or nimbus, what is love to your silence, click-clack the machines of your dreams, uncut nails of the Airedale terriers, string of patio lights hung by your here-now generosity, what of the garden? What of what is beyond— * Third Tour there’s waiting, then wait and how dare you take so long to get here, air blasted past dust and dusty blinds, detonation of overripe, out-seasoned vine-grown tomatoes, so come through, blown open: I’ll make tea, pay half the bills, we’ll census dead birds and marvel at their eyes still, still unblinking into us * Sig Sauer she put a gun in my hand why else would I hold it? I wanted her the... Continue reading

This week, as Guest Author, I will be spotlighting innovative work by women poets in the form of new writing and review-essays. Today I'm delighted to share a new poem by Karyna McGlynn. Karyna McGlynn is the author of Hothouse (Sarabande Books 2017), I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl (Sarabande Books 2009), and several chapbooks including The 9-Day Queen Gets Lost on Her Way to the Execution (Willow Springs Editions 2016). Her poems have recently appeared in The Kenyon Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Witness, Georgia Review, New England Review, and The Academy of American Poet’s Poem-A-Day. Karyna is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Christian Brothers University in Memphis. She’s an avid collagist and is currently working on a new book, 50 Things Kate Bush Taught Me About the Multiverse. Happy summer, and enjoy! A New Poem by Karyna McGlynn HOW TO TALK THE MANIC AWAY I used to be so mad—I had daggers coming out of my puffed sleeves. I decorated Easter baskets with the plastic daisies of my Fury & mounted them on Playtex-pink three-speeds. Every bike I ever owned suffered a spectacular death: hit by a grey Grand Am, tossed like a stone into the quarry, snatched through a broken window, found mangled in a ditch. I shook my swampy sobs out of their frames & ironed my playbills for breakfast. I mounted my miscues on the walls of a rocket. I covered my mistakes in neon & called it Art. I charged people to listen to me scream. I moved to the desert because I'm supposed to be capricious like that. Some people said my hubris would be better in the mouth of a dinosaur, or as the silhouette of a disgraced news anchor. In a West Texas bar, some girl asked if I'd seen the Marfa Lights. I stood up whiskily on my stool & said, “Bitch, I AM the Marfa Lights!” I used to collect lace collars & white gloves made for the Nervous & the Consumptive. I stalked old ladies’ estate sales. Some of still had boxes of seamed stockings wrapped in tissue paper & lavender water & bakelite hair combs. None of this stuff ever fit or endeared me to others. Imagine going through life with white cotton seams around your fingers. Imagine the Whole World saying, “Don't Touch.” Still, in several nightdresses I clambered over a field of sods. There was a desk in the distance with one light in its Top Drawer. The night was open to me. I took out my loudest shears & cut a hole in the landscape to make a space for the Silence I was immediately accused of violating. My afterlife was a trial of ill- fitting hats, spilled sugar & Little Girls who loved their pet bunnies too much. So much, they squeezed their lights out, nestled their bodies in the doll carriage. What shall I paint for the mourners: an old schooner marooned in a field of clover?... Continue reading

This week, as Guest Author, I will be spotlighting innovative work by women poets in the form of new writing and review-essays. Today I'm delighted to share a folio of poems by Dora Malech. Dora Malech is the author of three books of poetry: Shore Ordered Ocean, published by The Waywiser Press in 2009; Say So, published by the Cleveland State University Poetry Center in 2011; and, most recently, Stet, selected by Susan Stewart for the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets and forthcoming from Princeton University Press in September 2018. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including The New Yorker, Poetry, The Best American Poetry, Poetry London, Tin House, Lana Turner, The New England Review, and The Kenyon Review. She is the recipient of awards that include an Amy Clampitt Residency Award from the Amy Clampitt Foundation, a Writer’s Fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland, where she is an assistant professor in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. Happy summer, and enjoy! A Folio of Poems by Dora Malech Essay as yes, begged off bad beginnings, false starts of a star-sat self, her benched head cartoon bird spun, stunned out a long season. I came to claim I wouldn’t burden you with the trailed-off scrap heap of all the times I tried to explain (plain) already, but even without evidence of wadded paper, snowdrift of not that, it is those attempts that act as apologia, sense in absence, itinerant iterations’ cairns at the crossroads, hobo code in chalk or coal, worlds not long for these words. In other words: in other words, diary’s everyday no entry, inverse relationship between clarity and efficacy. I needed forms that could flail, fail, lists listing back toward their not-so-fresh catalysts, sepsis of afterbirth still lodged in the body, that which once nurtured lingering malignant.The I, just talk: just like that. Same went for the you(s): free on what messy out. I didn’t want to spill it—it meaning guts, etcetera, but mostly guts—because they weren’t all mine to spill, those two tin cans strung from the ends of viscera, the what-we-listen-to and where-we-feel-it, so to speak. In my belly, twisted sum [sic] sine in test. It’s an old story, sure, and came in waves. I left my name at the front desk. I waved. I left. Abbreviation: sin. The take lodged in to speak that leaves us P.S., postscript as remaindered O, sighed apostrophe to what we turn away (from). Even some years later, when the nurse explained the blood test, I felt the familiar flush as something else made sense. Material released: information that circulates in the bloodstream. To point to the center and say there wasn’t quite right after all. There were bits of the story flowing through me. In fact, the old imperative, echo of act in the sense of what’s done. Is done. What is, in a manner of speaking, riveted to the text?... Continue reading

This week, as Guest Author, I will be spotlighting innovative work by women poets in the form of new writing and review-essays. Today I'm delighted to share a poem by Lisa Olstein. Lisa Olstein is the author of four poetry collections, most recently, LATE EMPIRE (Copper Canyon Press, 2017). PAIN STUDIES, a book of lyric nonfiction, is forthcoming in 2020. Recipient of a Hayden Carruth Award, Pushcart Prize, Lannan Writing Residency, and Sustainable Arts Foundation Promise Award, she is a member of the poetry faculty for the University of Texas at Austin’s New Writers Project and Michener Center for Writers. Happy summer, and enjoy! A New Poem by Lisa Olstein SOFT TARGET I’d rather not walk through a lightning storm to see you, but that’s just the weather. Last night something struck out so suddenly from deep inside me, arriving it seemed to flee: a new feeling, a sudden realization, ancient knowledge forged in the chemical present. I meant to say soul, soul is where from, once forged, it fled, bringing its news of another place but it felt silly to say so. Anyway, a little death as coyly in literature they say was in play and outside the darkened room, too, explosions, but not the good kind. You see what I did there? By morning, I’d thought it would’ve died down but it hasn’t: angry alto monks, darkest echoes. I’m wearing my best boots for the occasion. Maybe it’s useless to carry this umbrella, maybe worse. Turbulence becomes you, becomes me, erases the difference, the distance by which we measure. I see I’ve played this all wrong, waiting, rushing, talking, still talking when silence is the only place we might meet. Continue reading