“Serpell cites the critic Elaine Scarry’s argument that reading is a manual of ‘procedures for reproducing the deep structure of perception’; she affirms Morrison’s body of work as a profound philosophical investigation.”
“From the first, his poems dug down into memory to find their source. Or, more precisely, the excavation of memory — both personal and cultural, and the continuity he sought in it — is his subject.”
“Not everyone has money / to repair damage from evil. / My job here is to protect / the people and their businesses. / Dad lives here. / Mom drove me here.”
“I was surprised when the figure I had taken for a statue or a standing stone opened its arms to receive the woman running from a nearby door and became a man.”
“So many varieties of transit take place, between modes of consciousness, different forms and self-states of writing and reading, awareness of experience, mortality, and textual legacy.”
“Stridsberg’s concerns go beyond the usual fictional conflicts—she’s looking for deeper schisms between the sane and the mad, the living and the dead, despair over our fate and our acceptance of it.”
“The calm before the storm will become the storm before the endless calm, / from which you will poke things through a slot to the other side / there, where you lived.”
“I am also learning // the point is to keep going, like the girl who fell miles from the sky / after lightning struck her plane …”
“You make me wish / to hold something / beyond the world I know, / where I will remove / scenes I never felt close to.”
“This doubleness — lament braided with exuberance, suffering braided with awe — structures the emotional, formal, and ethical terrain of the collection.”
“Mom’s paying me / in cinnamon rolls // to help her at / the Bake Sale // in the Church’s milky / cinderblock basement”
“Ritsos’ testimony is not just about the shedding of blood; he also testifies to behaviors and events that lie beyond our powers of explanation, even as we (or some of us) deplore them.”
“If you find me / under your shoe / let me be. // My composition / balances / my decay.”
“Richard and Warren write poetry that reckons with the mysterious separateness and encompassing closeness that are fundamental to how and what we feel, delivering the paradoxical ‘public face of privacy'”
“Even the night air can’t breach the edges of itself. / x words in the English language — there’s no agreement. / I wear them like lipstick. Rouged over for tradition.”
“Be present is a predictable instruction. Less often said: how slyly and how fast the present glides out of sight and hides somewhere behind us.”
“If my father could have put into practice / his insistence that the angle of incidence / equaled the angle of refraction, / he’d have won more games of pool.”
“… a gently told tale about harsh happenings, most of which are nothing more uncommon than everyday life during the hardscrabble years of economic depression after the First World War.”
“i am always wrestling with how to love you better / some balm amongst the bitter / leaning back against the tungsten edge of my heart / that is always swallowing me whole”
“Berlin Shuffle tracks the comings and goings of chance acquaintances connected by larger forces, most significantly the economic catastrophe of late Weimar Germany.”
“A novel should feel like you’re in good hands. / Maybe church was once this way —? / I still go, sometimes, I’ve got history; / affection for the memory is just my style.”
“I guess I’ll start with the ending. My brother and I didn’t manage to find flowers for our new baby sister that day. And we rode in a patrol car for the first time.”
“The narrative follows novelist M who, like Stepanova, has left Russia during the Ukraine war, and is now living in an artists’ residence in Europe, grappling with her new understanding of her home country and herself as a part of it.”
“Maybe it was easier for me to say some things by hiding behind a voice of the opposite sex? At the book launch, when I saw my mother in the room. I couldn’t read the passages where Aleksy hates his mother in front of her.”
“Wine is on the menu, / and some of us plan to order // beer, a salad of legumes, / roast meat and fruit —// mandarins, sufficiently sweet — / to make us utterly aware // of the dispiriting fact / that the world and the invincible years // will surely separate us …”
“We make our hands talk like puppets with funny voices / while Leadership predicts the future of the college ten years from now. / The Speech Professor whispers that management prefers to be called Leadership.”
“It looked like the discarded contents of a suitcase from twenty yards. Cloth and leather. But then Francis smelled it — sweet and rancid. Sulfur and ammonia.”
“’Gold is a treasure, and he who possesses it does all / he wishes to in this world,’ writes Christopher Columbus, / ‘and succeeds in helping souls into paradise.'”
“When I entered the church, there was music playing. / Shoulder to shoulder, silent women, / from nearby Reserves, had roused hope / to fill plastic bags with worn children’s clothing.”
“Doller defies a one-note reading experience through its adaptive lyric, its ironic quips, its exuberant study of micro and macro realms.”
“Like medieval mystics in their anchorages, my mind was on the long-term rewards of short-term sacrifices. I found myself embracing solitude for a higher purpose: not holiness, but haleness, wholeness.”
“When sex was new, // that smell felt free. I believed giving / my body helped me own it. When an animal / is in heat, does it perceive what that will bring?”
“So the day begins, / kettle vibrates, something in / the sink is clinking / chatter of metallic teeth”
“This is both the project of Jones’ memoir and the work of the analyst: to summon language for our fear of loss, to allow it to clarify the present. This difficult labor — and its effect on its practitioners — is often hidden from public view.”
“The distant past is indigenous. / The present hints at prophesy, / a country with more cars than drivers, // three hundred million vehicles.”
“He was a queer anarchist / with a mouth on him so when hassled / by a cop for riding his bike / on the sidewalk he jumped off, bike chain / clutched in his scabbed fists.”
“The book chronicles a period of prolonged silence inflicted on the author by her mother, Barbara, who may sever communication at any perceived slight.”
“A decade and a half later, / only my laptop kept time during jail visits. // Here in Arizona, in a house with no clocks, / only overpriced electronics / signal the hour.”
“I go by a name not mine but given to me / among mountains by Italian hosts impatient / with my own, its clash of consonant // coming to bear like sandpaper upon / the tongue.”
“In the painting, a rabbit / is riding a moose] / or perhaps a reindeer. I’ve never been good / at identifying large mammals …”
“My mother painted a colorful jungle / on the upstairs balcony with a deer, bear, / lion, elephant, wolf, lamb and birds / looking at me as they flapped.”