Category: The Last Word

Writers getting the last word. HFR is invested in elevating art by marginalized groups with this feature.

New Poetry: “Work and Punishment” by Sara Cosgrove

When I returned homefrom the interview(the one that made sense),I brought a bouquet. I brought hope and a funny story.I brought the beginning. Months later,when I returned home from work,I brought details …about my colleagues’ behavior,about following me into the restroom,about giving me strange tasks,about their token-friends-with-disabilities stories.Except their friends were smarter, sicker, and thinner…
Joe Milazzo: Four Poems from Plain Language

Plain Language The path by which you entered is barred to you. Grazed by a low eye, scarps of oak bark lump in a lunar mantle. My frailty catches a dagger in the engineering of any leaf. My deficit narrative is an egg-hauling ant. Oleo has its boons but, meanwhile, few of them are molten.…
New Translations by Kit Schluter: Three Poems by bruno darío

Great Expectations To encompass is to stroke the void, that subtle material.The heart fits into the physics of thingswhen we celebrate continuity between dimensions. Invasive imagery stalks my narration. Perception is an ally, and it lends structure;let’s try to unwrap experience and bring it sensitively out of focus,rendering it unclassifiable. Keep me company.You imagined it…
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…
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 Featuring works in progress, insight into Nichol’s thinking, previously unpublished prose and lyric, visual, and sound poems, Some Lines of Poetry documents Nichol’s “apprenticeship to language” and his playful daily exploration of the limits…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”…