Category: Poetry

Book Excerpt: Two Poems from What It Was Like to Be a Woman by Melinda Wilson

Melinda Wilson’s heroically tough and vulnerable book, What It Was Like to Be a Woman, relays this very information with grit and beauty. From childhood through to the present, Wilson’s poems illustrate that under patriarchy our bodies are never our own, and the struggle to keep what’s ours ours—mind and body—is one that spans a lifetime.…
Book Excerpt: Three from Tricia Middleton’s Novel-in-Verse Obsidian Situations

What is the obsidian situation? An act of mourning, committed in a mood of cocky abjection, against indifference and hollow repetition. The element is wet: fountains, sweat, vapours, wine, puddles, tears tears tears, soggy towels and the Seine flowing beneath. The form is layered, carefully folded, then crumpled and held together with an ancient ribbon.…
Poetry from the Future: “The Uncertainty Ballade” by Daniel Brennan

And of these rivers which curve as all rivers curve the way a scythe claims wheat there the gun’s warm tongue in your hands admire how these hands spread with worship like a greasy and over-thumbed takeout menu no this is not my native violence never the ease of inheritance the violets they are mid-bloom…
Side A Poetry: “It Might as Well Be” by Max Winter

It Might as Well Be Which is a stateIf the weather holdsAnd the wind arrives timelyIf it’s right it’s easyAs being hit by a carOr scooped from a litterHappiness for everybodyAnd a carbonated lime drinkWith a talking sailboatFinishing my sentencesAt moments you think for meLittle boatLittle squireI bequeath you everythingBut we’re not thereYet are weI…
New Poetry: “To Infinity and Beyond” by Joel Anthony Harris

I have a running sore on my chest, a pockmarked full moon that waxes radiant in inconsolable bereavement. I bear it as a nursery swaddled in shade cloth to ditch the sun. It is my silent wound. My silent night. A silence etched into my being as a sinkhole without the finality of rocks or…
Side A Poem: “To the First Twenty Years, Give or Take” by Anthony Robinson

To the First Twenty Years, Give or Take It was a childhood of chain link fences &a dozen kinds of rain an alluvial epochof brain & bone & polyhedral dicemuddy ditches & fir trees mailbox rows Dogs in single file. these words a surfeit of clinking changerender the past a cosmic vending machine primer gray…
New Poem for Side A: “Kandinsky” by Sandy Berrgian

Kandinsky I entered a dream worldof color and fireDay and nightgarden and fieldegg and dragonflyFlag and footballThis form a science fiction. Mini-interview with Sandy Berrgian by Rod Roland RR: What can you tell me about this poem? SB: Kandinsky is one of my most favorite artists. I was probably at the Guggenheim. I don’t know…
Book Excerpt: Six New Clark Coolidge Poems from Radium Out Cold

These poems are a kind of pure poetry that reflects the the writer’s life work of interacting with language. For those who are drawn in, this work can take on an importance that permeates how we think and hear and see and live, complete with an ongoing sense of play and utter joy in the…
Seven Poems from the Future: Jerome Sala

The Last Words of the Replicant, or, Blade Runner Revised “I have tasted flavors of which my fellow replicants have never even dreamed … I have consumed Sweet Mango Pringles in South Koreaand Hawaii-style Poke-bowl crisps in Hungary.I have gobbled down chocolate-coated snacks in Finland and Lasagna-flavored potato chips in Thailand.But I have never understood why…