Greg was gone for nine months before he returned. The same amount of time it takes to grow a child, Jess would often say. What he went through was much more difficult than being pregnant, he would remind her, letting his voice catch on the last vowel. He did this often lately, . . .
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My friend the songstress says there is nopoint in writing nature poems anymore, notunless you choke the verses with smoke and oiland insecticides—the Anthropocenedemands a new syntax. These days,she says, the body is everythingit isn’t. The corpse is still a body, but so isthe rapper’s discography and the bicameral legislature—from “Anatomy,” Volume . . .
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Photo: The Rio Grande Valley from Mount Cristo Rey, alongside the “GoFundMe” border wall. Almost immediately after landing at the airport, we changed all of our plans. We had a long list of museums to see and people to talk to as we embarked on our borderlands journey to West Texas, but almost . . .
Read MoreRead Part Five here. “And I remember Spain” It is, I think, no accident that MacNeice concludes section V of Autumn Journal with “the day is to-day” and then spends section VI remembering Spain, but the juxtaposition requires some explanation. The connection is neither chronologically nor narratively obvious. The poem’s present moment . . .
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Sir Patrick Steward read a Shakespeare sonnet-a-day on Twitter in order to get us through the Covid-19 pandemic. His gravelly yet elegant voice could turn the words in just the right way to make them clear to almost everyone, although sometimes he had to start over, because he tripped on the words. . . .
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I don’t believe in Judgement Day,but there are people who devoutly do.They bank on the dead rising like rehabilitated birds:parrots & finches, tanagers & herons—birds whose necks were broken and then restored.Or the dead rising like repaired robots.The thin pink-colored sugar waterin hummingbird feeders will re-inhabit veins.—from “Erasure,” Volume 61, Issue 2 . . .
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Literature is, and has always been, a social endeavor. As such, it is also an ethical endeavor, for it has to do with how humans imagine, know, and recognize ourselves and each other. We co-inhabit a searingly unequal world, yet we are also surrounded by awesome beauty, creativity, and possibility. It is . . .
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You hold my fists of lonelinessthat clench the clumsy weightof last ditch caresses. Beat intoyour vinyl sheen is the pain I lugto your altar to put the pain inmy hands:busted knuckle,bound wrist, sprained heart,—from “Alva and the Ode to a Punching Bag,” Volume 61, Issue 2 (Summer 2020) Tell us about one . . .
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It’s fascinating that Kazim’s response to the question of a South Asian American “canon” is to consider poetic careers cut short, truncated. The untimely deaths of Agha Shahid Ali and Reetika Vazirani deprived younger South Asian American writers of figures who might now be considered eminences within the field. For Kazim, Ali and Vazirani . . .
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Thank you to CAALS, especially Mai-Linh and Caroline, for inviting me to speak, and thanks, also, to Bryan who wrote such a thoughtful address. In my response, I’ll return to a few major points from Bryan’s address and end with a thought or two of my own. And, I’m really looking forward . . .
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