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Denise Duhamel
Hollywood, FL
Denise Duhamel is the author of Ka-Ching!
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Kwame Dawes’ Sturge Town was recently published by Norton. The book takes its title from a village in Jamaica—and uses it as an overriding metaphor for poems that travel from Ghana to the United States, stopping in one of the first free villages in post-emancipation Jamaica. Dawe’s poems sing with urgency—about crimes against black bodies, loss, addiction of a loved one, and the difficulties of religion. This is a book of mature wonderment and contemplation. All through these interior and exterior travels, Dawes poems are infused with light—wisdom, hope, and the actual sun. https://poems.com/poem/light-home/ Congratulations, Kwame! Continue reading
Posted Oct 16, 2024 at The Best American Poetry
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Yesterday Penguin published Paper Boat: New and Selected Poems: 1961-2023 by Margaret Atwood. This generous—624 pages!—book begins with Double Persephone, a 1961 chapbook by the then little-known Atwood. Famous, of course, for her novel The Handmaid’s Tale, you’ll find the same feminist mythmaking in the course of her poetry career. There are three “Previously Uncollected” sections of new poems which will enchant Atwood’s poetry fans. The final of the three of these sections contains the title poem and gives a call to poetry’s necessary reach. And Paper Boat contains her classics like this: [you fit into me] you fit into me like a hook into an eye a fish hook an open eye Congratulations, Margaret! Continue reading
Posted Oct 9, 2024 at The Best American Poetry
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Yesterday Graywolf Press published Hold Everything by Dobby Gibson. When I first read the book’s title I thought it referenced the movie of the same name from the 1920s which featured one of my favorite songs ”You’re the Cream in My Coffee.” While I was wrong, the book does have a wonderful coffee connection. The title poem is a stunning sonnet sequence, each of which was drafted during the time it took Gibson to finish a cup of coffee. There is a breeziness, a caffeinated energy, as the poet engages with the pandemic, the frightening world news, and the death of his friend Dean Young. The quick-witted voice never sacrifices the close attention to image, the wisdom in zooming out to see the big picture. Here’s an example: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/09/02/poem-never-to-be-read-aloud-dobby-gibson-poem Congratulations, Dobby! Continue reading
Posted Oct 2, 2024 at The Best American Poetry
Earlier this year Norton/Liveright published Skip Tracer by Jive Poetic. I will admit my unhipness when I confess Jive Poetic was a new voice to me—I wasn’t even sure if he was one person or a collective! And while that admission is embarrassing, it also served me as I read this exciting book, a memoir-in-poems, as Jive Poetic “contain(s) multitudes” and explores identity/multiple identities. His book is formatted like a DJ’s set list. (Jive Poetic is also DJ…) Through sections that invoke cassettes, reels, turntables, 45s, and a bonus track, he invokes the poet’s family and ancestors, including his grandfather “Skip.” Jive Poetic writes in his introduction “there are beats when I am you and me, and we are all of us in the mix.” Now I can attest I’m a tiny bit hipper. Now I can attest I’m a fan. You can hear him reading the first poem “Go Home” from the collection here: And read a little about his process here: https://poetrysociety.org/poems-essays/in-their-own-words/jive-poetic-on Congratulations, Jive! Continue reading
Posted Sep 25, 2024 at The Best American Poetry
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Sara Ries Dziekonski’s Today’s Specials was published this month by Press 53. The poems are situated in an all-American diner in Buffalo, NY owned and operated by her family—where Sara is a waitress and her father is a cook who almost missed his daughter’s birth because “When the call came, my father stayed/at the Holiday Inn kitchen/to fry fish for a party of seventeen.” The father “Super Dave” is a fascinating character, man of hardscrabble tenderness. When he tells his daughter “You gotta pay attention” in the fast-paced short-order world of filling orders, she translates that advice to writing poetry. Today’s Specials serves up details galore—gumball machine, jukebox, the customers with bad hygiene (“The Urine Couple”), the sleezy customers, mourning customers, a customer who is a professor, Onion Eddie, Eggs Bennie Debbie, Old Fat George, Country Joe, Safety Pin Joe, Security Guard Richard… Sara writes tenderly about the push and pull of the diner, big dreams of getting away and nostalgia for the family business in poems like this. Family Diner’s Facelift Antique cans swaddled in greasy garments of time, boxed with the Norman Rockwells, penny candy jars I’d Windex on slow afternoons when all the stainless steel shined. Fresh paint where the gallery of past owners hung high above the ice cream freezer: gone. Ghosts. The grill banished far from workers’ stories that burn in memory of steel mills. Soups, gravys, and corned beef hash—my father’s recipes remain, his poems, written for 32 years with hard spatula scrapes behind the counter. Today I request a refill and stare at string lights where a payphone once rang dreams— now still. Congratulations, Sara! Continue reading
Posted Sep 18, 2024 at The Best American Poetry
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Ayokunle Falomo’s Autobiomythography of was published yesterday by Alice James Books. This powerhouse of a book—with a powerhouse of a title—centers on the stories we tell ourselves and each other, the mythologies of our families, our struggles, our heritage. Falomo begins the first poem in his book “I was a boy once &/ I did not show the world my teeth…” In the leaps that follow, he is ready to show us now—his grit, his humor, his vulnerabilities, his Nigerian sensibility—in poems that explore colonization and decolonization, the identities thrust upon him and those he chooses. The book is a wild inner-globetrotting which ends with the tender “Thank You Ancestors Who Loved Me.” Interspersed are a series of spectacular “self-portrait” poems like this one: https://www.usi.edu/sir/ruth-awad-poetry-picks/self-portrait-with-thorn-necklace-and-hummingbird Congratulations, Ayokunle! Continue reading
Posted Sep 11, 2024 at The Best American Poetry
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Michael Chang’s TOY SOLDIERS was just published as winner of the Action, Spectacle poetry prize. Once again, Chang is producing bold, unapologetically sassy poems with a nod to the New York School (“my copy of lunch poems, white orange & blue...”). TOY SOLDIERS contains a delightfully dizzying array of poetic references like “go smoke a doobie norman dubie.” Chang invites the world into their poems where you’ll find Katy Perry, Ron Padgett, H.E.R., Richard Gere, Allen Ginsberg, Janelle Monáe, Liza Minnelli, Sid Vicious, “Cagney & Lacey,” Paul Klee, Chubby Checkers, Chelsea Handler, Olivia Munn, Phil Collins and Meg Ryan. And you’ll be reminded of the flimsy news stories we eat like candy—like Amy Schumer accused of cyberbullying Nicole Kidman. TOY SOLDIERS is chockful of Chang’s signature text abbreviations and quotes from a diverse variety of artists including Wallace Stevens, Randall Jarrell, Thom Gunn, Ai, Alfred Lord Tennyson, A. Van Jordan, John Wieners, Future, and The Cure to craft poems of sublime political awareness. Legal diction peppers their poems—defendants, plaintiffs, intellectual property, trade secrets, and res judicata. The book is worth its price for the prose poem “THE GLORIOUS GAIN,” a dishy (and frankly terrifying) look by the Supreme Court by an insider who’s clerked for two federal judges. Chang can also serve up fabulously funky love poems like this: SALON SONNET take this into the bedroom carry us to that boundary the tabletop a lazy susan of confusion as if gnat or soft cheese a furry wall get out the knife clothes & comebacks r all i have left plus the easy afterglow of seeing u which i now have the ballet music ringing ringing ringing Congratulations, Michael! Continue reading
Posted Sep 4, 2024 at The Best American Poetry
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Last week Bluff by Denez Smith was published. It is fitting indeed that Graywolf, based in Minneapolis, has shepherded this collection, which focuses on the city as a place of protest after the murder of George Floyd. In the sprawling, eight-page poem “Minneapolis, Saint Paul,” Smith brings us the unbearable news. Though their poetry is powerful/brilliant, Smith doesn’t always try to make Bluff pretty—“it doesn’t feel like a time to write when all my muses are begging for their lives.” Smith’s honest about the limitations of what poetry can do and, like all poets, seems to even chastise themselves for writing it—“i’m a/ coward, a slave to slavery, it makes me a/ salary.” Or consider this chilling line—“they clapped at my eulogies. they said encore, encore.” There is so much to admire in this searing manifesto of a book. Bluff, even while acknowledging the shortcomings of art, simultaneously affirms it. Here’s “anti poetica”: https://poets.org/poem/anti-poetica Congratulations, Denez! Continue reading
Posted Aug 28, 2024 at The Best American Poetry
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In this class, we’ll put aside the sonnet and sestina and look to more quotidian modes for poems–think personal ads and dictionary definitions, emails and Amazon reviews. Be prepared to find poems in unlikely places! This is a generative workshop. Continue reading
Posted Aug 23, 2024 at The Best American Poetry
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Joan Larkin’s Old Stranger was published yesterday by Alice James Books. I first became a fan of Larkin’s after reading her exquisitely painful “Blackout Sonnets” from A Long Sound (1986). It’s fascinating to me how the themes displayed in this early sonnet crown—alcoholism, recovery, rape, abortion—are revisited in Old Stranger, urgently, beautifully, almost forty years later. Her sonnets have loosened in terms of rhyme but not in terms of their power. Decidedly feminist, these poems are what readers need in these regressive times. Larkin also deals with mortality—hoarding, pain, canes—with aplomb and candor while remembering the indignities of youth. Here is the sonnet that opens the book: Girls Department I stared at my shameful flesh in the three-way mirror. Mother, my guide, my witness, pinched me between her fingers, thinking aloud: could she work with the skimpy seam allowance? Get it to fit? My model-thin cousin Nancy sent me a box of hand-me-downs: soft wool skirts, an orchid sweater-set a size too small –– another girl’s raiment. My sister meant well, Mother instructed, then took me to Brigham’s for a treat: hot fudge melted breast-like pyramids of peppermint-stick ice cream, and I crunched the small clear candies. I sang in a talent contest once, “Indian Love Call” in a green tulle gown Mother grabbed from a bin. She had an eye for a bargain. She took up the hem. Congratulations, Joan! \ Continue reading
Posted Aug 21, 2024 at The Best American Poetry
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In this class, we’ll put aside the sonnet and sestina and look to more quotidian modes for poems–think personal ads and dictionary definitions, emails and Amazon reviews. Be prepared to find poems in unlikely places! This is a generative workshop. Continue reading
Posted Aug 9, 2024 at The Best American Poetry
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Even the Least of These by Anita Skeen was published last month by Michigan State University Press and includes a series of stunning linocuts by artist Laura B. DeLind. The poems are situated during the covid-19 pandemic, a time in which Skeen deepened her relationship with the ten-line poem and wrote one a day, selecting the best for her collection. Committed to this form, she has taught workshops on such and was open, in this book, to the twenty-line poem as well. Many of the poems are observations of the natural world and its creatures—birds, cats, bats, ants, termites, beetles, woodchucks and chickens. “No Wheelbarrow, No Rain” gives a sly nod to William Carlos Williams. In another poem it is a banana popsicle that is “so sweet and so cold.” Skeen turned 74 during the pandemic and writes a poem about it, as well as her grandchildren with the urgency of capturing her life, her own mother, and her childhood. There’s even a how-to poem called “Ten Lines,’ which begins “In the first one set the scene….” There’s a charm and ease to these poems while not shying away from the trauma of the pandemic or the lives lost. Continue reading
Posted Aug 7, 2024 at The Best American Poetry
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Judy Brackett Crowe’s The Watching Sky was published by Cornerstone Press earlier this year. The poems therein are those of an expert storyteller, full of details of rural America and the natural world. She tackles the perils of class and climate change with an especially good poem about a tornado. Crowe looks back on her life with awe and candor, a nostalgia rooted in a way of life that seems long gone. We are lucky to have her document it all for us! Here’s a sample poem: Geography of a Cloud Once on a long-ago winter’s day she drew a huge map of her world on butcher paper, using every crayon stub in the small cedar box that held the bright clear colors of her life, an immense cloud-shaped world, endless, with hills and wide rivers, stick people, kind people like Teacher and her aunties and her friend Jane, houses, horses, dogs, sunflowers and hollyhocks. The torn blue edges were the sky and whatever lived beyond the fall-off places and beyond the sky— roiling deserts, flat black seas, ice-bound lands— triangle creatures with wiry whiskers and many legs. Later, hundreds of thousands of miles later, bittersweet and periwinkle and Prussian blue and flesh and magenta later, and thistle, salmon, gold and silver later, after decades in the fall-off places, she found herself in that cloud-shaped map again, the colorful world still smelling of crayon and cedar, of onions and summer, and of the fields she’d looked down upon from her childhood window in that long-ago time, surprised to find her map so small and so red, blue, and yellow strange. Continue reading
Posted Jul 31, 2024 at The Best American Poetry
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This month, Graywolf Press reissued Claudia Rankine’s Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. The twenty years since its first publication are contextualized in a brilliant intro by Rankine. While she was then engaging with terrorism, George W’s wars, and race riots, the book, sadly, holds to be as relevant today—even more so. “I stop watching the news. I want to continue, watching, charting, and discussing the counts, the recounts, the hand counts, but I cannot. I lose hope.” She is writing about the reelection of Bush, but she could as easily be writing about the pandemic or any of the other tragedies that have followed. Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo. The personal is political and the political is personal. And Rankine is able to make it a lyric. It was interesting to read in her introduction that Richard Howard first identified the poems in Don't Let Me Be Lonely as “lyric.” I was mesmerized re-reading this first in her lyric trilogy. It holds up—and I only wish it felt more like history than our ongoing present. Continue reading
Posted Jul 24, 2024 at The Best American Poetry
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On July 9th, Norton published Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation by Emily Van Duyne. This is the best book I have read on Plath....and I have read them all. And so has Emily Van Duyne, who is able to build upon and refute earlier accounts of Plath’s life. Van Duyne confirms (with evidence!) everything you may have suspected about Hugh's abuse and control, and the ultimate shaping of his wife’s legacy as the madwoman/witch. But Van Duyne also captures the light/wonderful parts of the Plath's legacy. Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation is an extremely well-researched account, which highlights misogyny in the literary world—and the world at large—and the way intimate partner violence is often ignored or excused. Continue reading
Posted Jul 17, 2024 at The Best American Poetry
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For today’s offering, here’s Sandra Yannone’s gorgeously long, skinny, balloon string of a poem which was first published in SWWIM on May 17. The shape of the poem also invokes the emaciated bodies of that era—and her deft line breaks slow us down on this elegiac path. At the AIDS Walk in My Pre-Gay Twenties Years ago now I walked among the dying. I was already dead. I was a shroud of skin wrapped around bones no one could touch. This is one version of what it means to be dead. Around me, often circling, teetering like metal candelabra angels, were too plenty of the others dying, who in the moment had outlived Mostly middle-aged gay men dying into their shadows. We all walked for miles, for each other, for liberation, for purification, for healing, for life. The walks began and ended with swan boats in the Boston Public Garden. By the time I crossed the bridge at the finish line, under a rainbow of tethered balloons, more among me were that many steps closer to death, the air exhausted in their lungs labored further heaving, sighing, some pulsing into oxygen masks while seated in wheelchairs, escorted by lovers and friends, some who would not be permitted to witness their beloved’s final grasps for air before the lights blew out behind their eyes. But this day, sunlight. Every AIDS walk, sunlight. We would walk into the sun for miles beaming before together we would burn our skin always like flash paper ready to combust. Continue reading
Posted Jul 10, 2024 at The Best American Poetry
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The Lengest Neoi, by Stephanie Choi, was published earlier this year as a winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize. Its title is a play on the Cantonese phrase (Leng Neoi / “Pretty Girl”), subverting expectations of Asian American femininity via code-switching and “mistakes.” In the tender “Speech Derapy” the speaker enters therapy to learn to say her “th” sounds. Language and communication are always at the forefront. Choi also subverts—or, more aptly, enlarges—what we think of as poetry, making forms from crossword puzzles, emails, and voice messages, and text chains. She also pays homage to Marilyn Chin’s “My Name” and her grandmother who features prominently in the book. Here’s the exquisite “Poem Written in My Grandmother’s Dress.” https://blackbird-archive.vcu.edu/v21n3/poetry/choi-s/grandmothers-page.shtml Congratulations, Stephanie! Continue reading
Posted Jul 3, 2024 at The Best American Poetry
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This spring Clint Margrave edited the posthumous collection Requiem for the Toad: Selected Poems of Gerald Locklin. Locklin (1941-2021) published over a hundred books in his lifetime and Margrave distilled his career into a brilliant and representative 244 pages. Here’s what I wrote for the back cover… REQUIEM FOR THE TOAD is a gift to iconoclasts everywhere. Irreverent, hilarious, and sometimes downright heartbreaking, Locklin had a voice like no other. Early in the book come these lines: “Do you love me?” I asked./“Love you? How could I love a toad?” And the rest of the book teaches us to do just that. From his musings on everyone from Snoopy to David Hockney, from Ernest Hemingway to the Beach Boys, from Sartre to his friend Bukowski, Locklin gives us zingers about life and mortality. Clint Margrave has assembled one helluva book. Locklin is the toad that never transformed into a stereotypical prince, but kiss these pages and he will be your Prince of Poetry! Continue reading
Posted Jun 26, 2024 at The Best American Poetry
Peter Mishler’s Children in Tactical Gear spoke to my Mattel-obsessed heart. In 1997, I wrote Kinky, a series of poems in which Barbie becomes a vehicle of satire to explore consumerism, misogyny, and violence. Mishler has similarly taken Mattel/Hasbro/Target to task, via surreal metaphors—this time toy weapons—to a nearly apocalyptic landscape of sinister/capitalistic imagination. Winner of this year’s Iowa Prize, Children in Tactical Gear is a feat! You can hear Mishler read one of my favorites from the book “Sonnet (You Can Tell It’s Mattel)” here: Congratulations, Peter! Continue reading
Posted Jun 19, 2024 at The Best American Poetry
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woke up no light is the first poetry collection by novelist Leila Mottley (Nightcrawling). The 2018 Oakland Youth Poet Laureate, Mottley is astonishingly now only 22 years old. I say “astonishingly” due to the quality and wisdom of the poems in woke up no light (Penguin, 2024). Mottley plays homage to her foremothers (both poetic and scholarly) with opening quotes by Ntozake Shange and Saidiya Hartman and exceptional poem “After Want by Joan Larkin.” She writes about race and girlhood/womanhood with candor. If you want to understand a little bit about the joys and challenges faced by a mighty smart Gen Z writer, woke up no light is for you. Continue reading
Posted Jun 12, 2024 at The Best American Poetry
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This spring Anhinga Press published Éric Morales-Franceschini’s Syndrome via the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. Syndrome, chosen as the winner by Juan Felipe Herrera, explores Puerto Rican identity via a rich lexicon that includes code-switching between English and Spanish. Partly lyric, partly manifesto, the poems in Syndrome are political, challenging, and authentic. They build to a complex response to colonialization. You can read one of his amazing poems here… http://www.bodegamag.com/articles/525-aesthetic-theory Congratulations, Eric! Continue reading
Posted Jun 5, 2024 at The Best American Poetry
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Light Me Down: The New & Collected Poems of Jean Valentine (Alice James, 2024) is a gorgeously produced volume worthy of a major American poet. In her foreword, Anne Marie Macari aptly and elegantly describes Jean as a “once-in-generation poet of the interior life.” Light Me Down gathers all of Jean’s books as well as series of stunning “new” poems written in the last four years of her life, from 2016-2020. The titular poem is the first poem in the collection— Light me down to the long meadow to where the new snow taps on the fallen snow with the fingers of the lost tribe. Who would want us to listen? Someone does want it:           Mother of snow smoking your cigarette ration, your dark lipstick mouthprint hungry for the frail paper, long after the war was over. While Jean was indeed a poet of interiority, she was also keenly engaged with the world—wars, family life, poverty, injustice. Her daring and mysterious verse, rooted in time but yet timeless, wants us to listen. Continue reading
Posted May 29, 2024 at The Best American Poetry
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I just came across Málaga, Lucinda Ebersole’s novella, published posthumously by Peacock Press in 2023. Written in 224 chapters, none longer than a page and some as short as a sentence, Lucinda takes us on a journey from Jane Bowle’s unmarked grave to the ghost of Anaïs Nin to a suitcase full of plastic saints—via a threesome with strangers and an affair with a strange bullfighter. It’s a novella with a poet’s sensibility. Lucinda Ebersole (March 12, 1956 – March 20, 2017) described Málaga as "a really weird little novel that is sort of 'transgendered' kind of poetry, kind of a novel." It’s the perfect beach read as much of the action takes place by the sea! -- Denise Duhamel Continue reading
Posted May 22, 2024 at The Best American Poetry
My friend Maureen Seaton (1947 –2023) was a dedicated collaborator. She was part of a writing group Tres Abuelas y Una Mamá whose chapbook was just published by Anhinga Press. Maureen (one of the abuelas) wrote with two other abuelas—Carolina Hospital and Holly Iglesias—and one mamá Nicole Hospital-Medina. This is what I provided for the back cover: HOW TO GET INTO TROUBLE will delight you in every possible wicked (and sacred) way! Tres Abuelas y Una Mamá weave their poetry magic, collaborating on poems so sly you’ll never be sure which mamá wrote which (witch?) line. Now that you’ve had your cake and eaten it too, surrender to the wiles of your foolhardy heart and go wherever she wants to go. When the poets go solo (each poem is identified by initials) you still feel the influence of the other mamás. This is a gem of a chapbook with great advice— Call upon a fairy who is yourself. You’ll find yourself reading and chuckling then wanting to write poems, too, to join in the mischievous fun. You can hear this fabulous foursome here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lOWpHgacmY Continue reading
Posted May 15, 2024 at The Best American Poetry
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Catherine Barnett’s Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space was published yesterday by Graywolf. Grief and farce collide throughout the book, the vertebrae of which are ten exquisite prose poems called “Studies in Loneliness.” The opening stanza of Solutions finds the child speaker asking for her own room, away from her two little sisters. She wants to move to a spare near her “father’s prized ice machine dropping its tiny cubes automatically, all night long.” Solitude vs. loneliness—the dilemna of most writers who want to observe, be apart, sometimes seemingly cold to the rest of the world. In the second “Studies in Loneliness” entry we find “I like to fall asleep and wake up in a cold room.” The sixth ends with “Ash on my winter hat.” By the penultimate installment of “Studies in Loneliness,” we learn the speaker “keeps buying secondhand cashmere sweaters because wearing cashmere makes me feel as if [she’s] wearing another human body.” And in the last poem we are back to the cold, this time refilling a dying friend’s “glass with cold water.” In between these “studies” are more gorgeous poems about living with the knowledge of our singular existence, what we must so often face alone. Congratulations, Catherine! Continue reading
Posted May 8, 2024 at The Best American Poetry