Category: The Last Word

Five Tellings by Moikom Zeqo from His Book Sellers of Chaos

Born in Durrës in 1949, Moikom Zeqo was considered one of Albania’s very most important writers and public intellectuals. (When I visited Zeqo in Tirana in 2019, we couldn’t walk more than a couple blocks without a stranger stopping us to pay respects.) In 1974, Zeqo’s writing was suppressed for incorporating free verse and surrealism,…
Some Lines of Poetry from the Notebooks of bpNichol

Some Lines of Poetry gathers excerpts from bpNichol’s journals across the 1980s to give a unique perspective on craft, process, and a writer’s life. Featuring works in progress, insight into Nichol’s thinking, previously unpublished prose and lyric, visual, and sound poems, Some Lines of Poetry documents Nichol’s “apprenticeship to language” and his playful daily exploration of the limits…
Poetry Excerpt: From Words in Danger of Falling Out of the Vocabulary by Eric Lindley & Joe Milazzo

Freightv.1. To inscribe, write or otherwise make marks that are to be read (more properly, read back) in non-linear fashion. To write a text that is both an Eulerian trail and a magic square.2. To mumble from the heart.3. To tabernacle under the umbels. To retire to the weeds to mildew the saccharine and honey…
Two Poems by Guillaume Apollinaire, Newly Translated by Jefferey Samoray

Translator’s note: the originals of both poems were first published in the Apollinaire collection Le Guetteur mélancolique (The Melancholic Watchman). To the best of my knowledge, my translations represent their first appearance in English. Tristesse de l’Automne Vous êtes le soldat de toutes les bontésA vous voir la douleur tremble fuit et s’étonneVoyez votre départ…
“Theatre and Science,” a Postscript Chant by Antonin Artaud, translated by Peter Valente

An exhibition of Antonin Artaud’s paintings occurred on July 4, 1947, at the Galerie Pierre in Paris. Artaud had arranged an event on the first night but it was not a success and so he prepared a second event and decided that it would only by invitation only. He prepared the text, “Theatre and Science”…
“Il Divino”: A Hybrid Travelogue by Brandi George

And there was Michelangelo, the famous Renaissance painter who I worshipped as a child, writing his name over and over on the pages of my notebook, as if the meaning of life was there in the syllables: Michelangelo Michelangelo Michelangelo Mich-el-ang-el-o I grew up on a farm, and the only books I had access to…
Three Original Prose Poems by Michael Robins

On Solitude What can only be a perfect phrase, hurried on the back of a receipt, subsequently caught in the wind & flown forever away. Your eyes are not what they were, imperfect & especially in the morning before gravity once more proves us little. First to sit in the reglazed tub, its waters rise…
New Poetry by Matthew Johnson: “My Front Yard in Summer”

The Moon felt like a tingly blur on my skin, And as it gradually slid down my shoulder through my forearm,I tried to smack at it like it was a marsh mosquito, Or an arcade game of whack-a-mole. We soft tossed Wiffle balls when the sun went down,And the whistle of the breeze passing through the hollow,…
Poetry by Sarah Fawn Montgomery: “Wading”

Father taught me craftwas the way to catch fish from a lureminnow shining. Hope was a fool’s lesson.Skill was flesh hung from a hook, casteasily into indifferent water. I pulled bodies breathlessfrom safety to shore, watched rainbows thrashat my muddied boots. Flaking flesh from brittlebone I feasted when full. Sometimes I tossed bodiesback into the…