I’ve always admired the way Alison C. Rollins’s poetry bridges urgency and experimentation. In her hands, objects from the archive are transformed into poetic vectors to imagine other worlds, other possibilities. I’ve also been following and admiring her recent experiments with creating physical objects from this poetic process. When we received her exquisite . . .
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Photo by Rick Bern “We came to think of it as our painting: two figuresEmbracing in a corrugated field, its patina of sunlightAnd stroked grasses beside the soot-stacks of factories,Their stern faces flat as prisons. Plumes of smokeUnravelling the shirt of sky.”—from “Factories at Clichy,” Volume 63, Issue 2 (Summer 2022) Tell . . .
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“‘C’mon, ladies. It’s not fun for me either,’ Marina called. ‘Bend over and touch your toes.’ The wet nurses complied, their rumps rising up in a line of mottled curved. The lights weighed on them, all nude except for cotton underwear.”—from, “The Milkmaid,” Volume 63, Issue 2 (Summer 2022) Tell us about . . .
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S.L.Cassar, Smyrna after the Great Fire. 1922. Public Domain. The centennial of the Great Fire of Smyrna is in 2022. “Today [Monday, 11 September 1922] I saw with my own eyes the Turks taking bombs, gunpowder, kerosene and everything necessary to start fires, in wagonfuls here and there through the streets,” the . . .
Read MoreMeg Kearney’s All Morning the Crows (The Word Works, 2021). Shelley begins his famous, “To a Skylark”: “Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! Bird thou never wert. . .” Then for the next few stanzas he works hard to show the “birdiness” of the bird, until he finally gives up in a series . . .
Read MoreAristotle imagined that red occured when “luminous transparency is covered by a thin burning smoke.” In California, in the Amazon, wherever forest fires spread, visions of a red future multiply. “With all the dust and smoke in the air, the world will begin to look different,” writes one reporter.—from “Fugitive Reds,” Volume . . .
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