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“Good Girls, Good Mothers” & “Talking to Animals”
“… Mothers who married / before sex, who were taught nothing, / who knew little of the desire they saw floating // through the air like bubbles.”
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on Selected Poems of Calvin C. Hernton, edited by David Grundy & Lauri Scheyer
“His signature qualities: an interest in place, particularly contrasting the north and south; a self-deprecating but assertive speaker; and the use of rhythmic declarative statements strongly tied to the spoken word tradition.”
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“On Mothering, Mortality, and the Wankel T. rex” & “Telling the Bees”
“Easter morning, my sleeping teenager hushes the house, / the only child still here, and not a child. Too old / for the scrawl of wax crayon on shell, the patient perching / of bent copper handle into purple vinegar.”
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“Noontime” & “Junk Moon”
“At noon the church bells roll a hymn across our roofs. / ‘Misses the B flat minor,’ my neighbor complains, // Although I can’t hear the notes she hears …”
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“Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl”
“On the basement wall, top of the stairs, / they Scotch-taped my two crayoned drawings, / sprung alive when I flicked the lights on. // I hated them.”
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“Premeditatio Malorum”
“The old people dealing cards at the picnic table in porchlight — / a study in chatter and laughter and smoke, in yellow buglight and shadow …”
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“Four and a Half Years”
“And maybe one morning as you / inspect the lake outside your window, / a speck of that dust will lodge in your eye / and blur the pictures in their frames …”
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on A Line in the World, nonfiction by Dorte Nors, translated from the Danish by Caroline Wright
“… a masterpiece of place-based nonfiction with soothing, rhythmic sentences that mask the intrusive outside world like a white noise machine.”
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Letters to the Six Conservative Justices of the Supreme Court
“Dear Amy Coney Barrett, / Have you ever wept when someone you don’t know is kind to you? / The nurse who held my hand during my second abortion / said the quick loss of pregnancy hormones could have caused my weeping.”
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“Stop Bath” & “Lease”
“By seventeen, I knew to slide open a window without making a sound, how to run. Knew the right skirt, right angle to tilt my hip, right corner of Richmond Road to hitchhike on …”
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“Goodbye!”
“I have heard it is common for one to say a dying person’s name to them as they die, as if to call them back from their death. I wish I had never heard this.”
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“In My Other Life My Mother Fails” & “Dish Pigs”
“It’s what you call yourselves. I know / your skin is slick with fry oil, that the sour- / sponge smell in your hands lingers / even after you shower …”
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Twenty Poets Name Some New Favorites to Celebrate National Poetry Month
To celebrate National Poetry Month, I asked some friends to recommend a new or recent poetry title for the site’s readership. Many thanks to everyone for naming some favorites. RS *** Where X Marks the Spot by Bill Zavatsky (Hanging Loose Press, 2006) recommended by Michael Collier Unlike almost all the other New York School…
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Sleeping With Houdini, prose poems by Nin Andrews
Nin Andrews writes entertaining, personality-driven prose poems pretending to tell the candid truth about their subjects, finally. The work isn’t as “scandalous” and “outrageous” as one of her blurbers insists, since her sensibility has much in common with movies and TV where irreverence, suggestive or graphic, is a pop staple. But there’s a shrewd calculation…
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The Elephanta Suite, a novel by Paul Theroux (Houghton Mifflin)
In “The Gateway of India,” the middle section of Paul Theroux’s new novel, Dwight Huntsinger is dispatched to Mumbai to close outsourcing deals for his company in Boston. When he returns, he is celebrated as a hero. “He had been welcomed home as though he had been in the jungle, returned from the ends of…