It was a tricycle, abandoned in some weeds along the river, that prompted this story. In my first draft, I began with section 2, the theft of the trike, and concluded with section 1, the chronological beginning of the tricycle’s history and the saddest of the three sections. I suppose the current order, which is chronological, simplifies things, and since the story is already disjunct, simplifying the chronology seemed like the right choice.
My mother, the poet, Rosemary Cappello, believed in the power of literary journals, and of poetry, to change the world. Of course she was a lover of books, inveterately so, but she reserved a special place on her shelves for literary journals where many voices, many moods commingle; where micro-communities and collectives are forged; where the aura of the times in which we live is marshalled for the sake of future enlightenment.
In “Happiness is a Warm Gun (Summer 1969),” Norman and his brother Murray are learning the ropes of marksmanship at a Boy Scout camp with Tiger Darling, a former Marine, providing instruction. The power dynamic on the shooting range plays as imagined with macho tension provided by Tiger sporting “paratrooper pants and dark shades” in conflict with Norman who aligns himself more with the older boys wearing “tousled hair longer than dad would ever allow…dark shades, like the ones he’d seen in recent pictures of John Lennon…they were from a town called Cohasset, and he figured that place had to be right next to Coolsville.”
Ever since my father handed Neruda’s Isla Negra, he has been one of my favorite poets. This used to be a much longer poem, then I started revising it for more than a month. You just can’t avoid mentioning Neruda’s romantic-erotic tendencies that are prevalent in his oeuvre, hence the poem’s last 4 stanzas.
The poem is not ekphrastic in nature. Instead, I wondered what it’d be like to call a poem after a made-up work of art, to pose as ekphrasis without actually being said. At the time I wrote the first draft of this poem in December 2016, I’d been seeing lots of poems beginning with ‘Landscape’ and thought perhaps I ought to attempt one. I came up with the title first and wrote the poem towards what I thought the painting might look like with such a title.
34. It seems I stand there now, that I’ll continue to stand, long after all has been demolished. Can you see me, erect in the doorframe, white smock over dusky dress—fastened by ribbons, ornamented
with crucifix and pocket watch—dark hair parted, perpetually awaiting my students?
The poem emerged from a refusal of lines, borders, and boundaries, and it owes this formal energy to dreams, to dreaming—and to the pleasure of instrumentation (or the manner in which a piece is arranged for instruments).
While playing with the form and dispensing his poetic wit, Kevin creates an ecosystem of thought and image, commentary and memory. Over seven pages the first part’s final poem, “Narrative,” includes couplets with passages erased in strikethrough font, section and column breaks, lineated lines and prose sections with stanza breaks written as “[stanza break],” without the actual break.
In Down Low and Lowdown the blues manifests in multiple ways: as lament, as prelude to creativity, taking stock of one’s surroundings, as mourning, as ennui and weariness with life and time.
After finishing my debut collection, Dear Specimen, [Beacon Press, 2021,] I wasn’t looking for a radically different way to approach the page, though I was intrigued by contemporary collections that contain visual poetry, such as Diane Khoi Nguyen’s Ghost of, Don Mee Choi’s Mirror Nation, and Paisley Rekdal’s West: A Translation. After revisiting these collections, I realized that the four italicized lines which are left justified at the bottom of “Crossfire Highway” (OSR Vol. 13, No. 1) deserve a more imaginative setting than I’d given them.
I first started writing this poem as an experiment to try to explore my relationship with religion. I come from a Hindu family, and I was given one of the names of God, but even now, when I am asked what it means, I am not always sure what to say. What does it mean to have a name that holds such divine force, to carry that with me for the entirety of my life?
I wrote the first two-thirds of this “sonnet of sonnets of another poet’s lines” in 2017—it was the beginning of a time in which my sense of what makes a poem completely shattered. Though it might seem as if the italicized lines of Delmore Schwartz are some play of pastiche, they’re more like porticos under which I felt I could hide from the storm of my own lines coalescing, or not.
A quote from George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman hangs in my kitchen which reads “There is no love sincerer than the love of food” and I think that tends to be true. I love food, perhaps more than I should and I have spent many a day on a barroom stool with a pile of wings in front of me.
It’s very difficult for me to understand the people, events, circumstances, and cultural detritus of my life without giving them a shape through writing. And I don’t say this as a point of pride. It’s just a fact, a fact that can be pretty inconvenient, since writing takes time, aloneness, and deep concentration, and because I have difficulty expressing myself in other ways.
I have slowly come to the realization that healing and closure are not possible for me, especially when such losses occurred early in my childhood. There is this scar that I have, this “hole in my stomach,” and I just have to learn to acknowledge and accept that it will always be a part of me.
The Pacific swallows up the two boys. The surreal wailing of the mothers and the imaginary journey of the boys deep into the water fills the opening stanzas but quickly shifts to the transformation of the environment, the story. The boys become the boy/boyhood of the speaker. The past, still present creating the now of the narrative. All an act of Telekinesis, the psychic ability allowing an individual to influence a physical system without physical interaction.
lately I’ve been thinking of poetry as one of the first recording devices…and you ask yourself, What shall I record? And how shall I make it pleasing? And I am drawn to some of the more intense experiences I’ve had, many of which were pleasantly dumb
“Snow” is also a piece of a larger, work-in-progress series of stories. Winter in a northern village vanishes overnight and is replaced by a scorching heat. At first, the world melts—streams and the village lake swell, roads wash away, basements fill. As the heat lingers, the world dries out—streams disappear, mud becomes dust, the lake recedes so much that the villagers wonder if it will be lost forever.
“Disappearing Act” borrows its title from the artist Bruce Nauman’s 2019 exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. I’m often inspired by art in all its forms, but this is one MoMA show that I just happened to stumble upon, knowing nothing about Nauman. His unsettling, multimedia installation affected me deeply, although at the time I didn’t understand my reaction. I recall walking down a corridor with unseen audio speakers, overlapping voices reciting the days of the week out of order.
John Hoppenthaler’s books of poetry are Night Wing Over Metropolitan Area, Domestic Garden, Anticipate the Coming Reservoir, and Lives of Water, all with Carnegie Mellon UP. With Kazim, Ali, he has co-edited a volume of essays on the poetry of Jean Valentine, This-World Company (U of Michigan P).
I’m not sure why the word “vicarious” brings to mind, for me, what it does, but when I hear it, I think first of the way that people taking photos pull the face they want the person on the other side of the camera to pull. Or the way parents try to get their babies to eat baby food by closing their lips around mouthfuls of air. Or how when a kid recites or reads something, if you love that kid and you know the words, you mouth them silently too.
I was inspired to write this poem by two poets, Rachel Mennies and Marie Howe. I loved the way Mennies, in her book, The Naomi Letters, would focus on a tiny word—one little word—and how it can change everything: relationships, not only for the speaker, but maybe for the reader as well. I focused on the word “but” when used in an apology, and how it negates that apology. What I’ve always admired in Marie Howe’s work is her ability to resist metaphor.
We are beyond ecstatic to have Tomashi Jackson’s Blessed Be the Rock for the cover of the 2024 Ocean State Review, a work that perfectly captures our aesthetic and the myriad contributors featured in the issue.
Zebrun’s characters, far from the pomp and ceremony of the Vatican, are the Italian and Irish working men and women of New York. In the modest homes, watering holes, and places of work and worship one is far more likely to encounter miracles, real discoveries, real forgiveness, real revelation—real creatures in need of nutrition, safety, and, at times, sanctuary.
“Lately I’ve been practicing to stay.” says the speaker in the prologue poem, “What the Sea Told Me.” And from there, as if on a tidal current, we are drawn into and out of worlds of water: sand, seafoam, flotsam, mammals, amphibians, fish, and crustaceans swirl around us. Eyre brings us close to what requires resolve and what needs resolving: how not to wreak havoc on this earth we clearly love; how to plumb the cells of our own bodies for memories of connection; ways to engage with the rest of nature but do no harm.
Nick Rees Gardner’s linked stories portray people as they are: alternately hilarious, desperate, resilient, broken. For the characters contained in Delinquents, the crux is determining which they’ll be when the music stops.
The baby in “Uncanny” could be a newborn or a poem—it tracks the amazement we bring to a creation that we’ve had little nothing to do with! The baby (who in literal reading is my artist-daughter) seemed to arrive fully formed years ago. One liminal night I realized that the adult child she’d become was also beyond me, and the poem slipped out.
Though not esoteric, the poems are certainly not easy either. They are by turns abstract and concrete, tender and brutal, glib and sincere. They don’t orbit a theme so much as they draw in a variety of themes by their own gravity. This gravity, their indelible weight, is the key strength to this impressively short yet epic book. Each poem is a dent in spacetime, and everything that crosses their event horizons is sucked in. This includes the reader’s interest.
Pui Ying Wong’s book of poems, Fanling in October, is both restrained and deeply surprising. She is a traveler, not just across borders, but across history, her own ancestry and that of others, in search of home—past, present, and future.
Unfiltered and full of dark humor, desire, and sexual energy, Southwick’s debut poetry collection, Orchid Alpha, unpacks the id of the modern day woman. The speaker flirts with the edges of gender constructs and social boundaries, between “being good” and inviting indiscretion. Played out in acrylic bathtubs and hotel bars, on hay farms, in the midst of psilocybin hills, ghost tours, and alone on blown up air mattresses, it isn’t always sex that’s desired but rather connection, excitement, and a giving in to “the wilderness, [as] it enfolds me, & I consent” (80).
The forward slash is used, of course, to indicate a line break when writing about poetry and since forward slashes are used throughout, “A Baton”—one of the few dualities—I will write out “(line break)” and consequently “(stanza break)” to honor the use of the forward slash in the poem.
Every Single Bird Rising is this poet’s second language. Xiaoly Li’s debut collection is both weightless and heavy, depending on the line your eyes end up lingering on. What I love about this collection is this text presents some challenges as a writer: I cannot tell you who I am without telling you about the Cultural Revolution.
Almost a decade ago, when I was in the thick of writing the first drafts of “The Itch” and the other linked stories in Radical Red, I scored a gig teaching “Humor Writing” and “The Hero’s Journey” over the summer at the Duke Young Writer’s Camp. I was qualified to teach the latter because I had read some Joseph Campbell; the former because I had cracked a couple of jokes during my interview.
From October 2019 to May 2020, poet Sean Singer and I wrote variously lined stanzas back and forth between where he was in New York and where I was in British Columbia and Arizona. Sean’s and my irregular-at-first correspondence took on special meaning and gained intensity during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic when we wrote the majority of the lines in the thirty-seven-page Google Doc we made together.
There’s much discourse around Marie Kondo. Something about the ill effects of late capitalism being assigned to the individual or choice rubs people the wrong way. Still, some of us desire order, control, some meaning in materialism. During a particularly nasty fire season, when the air was full of other people’s debris, I thought of her and I thought of Tracy K. Smith’s “The Weather in Space.”
I’ve witnessed our pup’s prolonged, soft wailing on only two occasions. The first was on his initial evening away from his mother and littermates, nestled on my lap. The second occurrence is depicted within this poem.
Kimberly Ann Southwick is an Aries with a Capricorn Moon & Ascendant. She is the founder & editor in chief of the literary arts journal GIGANTIC SEQUINS, which has been in print since 2009. Her debut full-length poetry collection, ORCHID ALPHA, is out via Trembling Pillow Press as of April 2023.
When writing a series of poems about toxic masculinity’s impact on climate change, I conceived of a nameless character simply referred to as “the hooligan”—a somewhat feral individual who lives at the farther edges of American society, who in some ways acts as a symbolic representation for the wild and chaotic within all of us.
This poem was written after I moved overseas for the second time and was feeling very uprooted. I had a file on my computer of family photos that was transferred to me by a family member, and I loved going through them for hours in an attempt to ground myself to a specific time and place, but to also distract from the vast changes my life required.
Deep pandemic days, fans blowing, windows open, temperatures checked, hands clean, my students masked or streaming little squares on my laptop, I taught Keats as I’ve done for years. I teach every ninth grader in the private school, every student reading this poem pursuing the hope of art and beauty against the weight of loss. Keats, sick with sorrow tells us, “my heart aches” and then tells us why: the groaning old men, young men growing thin with sickness, Keats’s own brother, and too soon, Keats himself, writ in water.
I lost someone I loved very much. One of the last meals we ever had together was homemade potato soup. The roof of his attic leaked whenever it stormed, which resulted in the kitchen’s ceiling light sometimes filling with water. I fell into a deep depression shortly after this person’s unexpected passing. After he passed, I began writing feverishly for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic.
I had already been wrangling with the urge to write about Tiresias as a trans/gender non-conforming figure. The two ideas merged in this poem, which originated as a prose form in response to Carson’s piece and also used a dialogue with a mother. Did Tiresias have a good relationship with his mother? Do seers even have mothers? Or do they spring up from the underworld fully-formed and spouting prophecy?
“While Thinking of Another’s Suffering” is one of seventy poems written for my first collection about an Angolan woman named Angela who arrived in Jamestown, Virginia, in August of 1619, more than a year before the Mayflower arrived in the North.
Jane Satterfield’s newest collection of poems, The Badass Brontës, reimagines the lives of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë, nineteenth-century sisters and authors who published under male pseudonyms and spent much of their short lives in their father’s parsonage on the Yorkshire moors. Often focusing on middle sister Emily, poet and author of Wuthering Heights, Satterfield’s poems probe our continued obsession with these sister-authors, lyrically exploring the details of their biographies and their cultural afterlives.
Sum Ledger is a powerful and wide-ranging meditation — via a dazzling array of poetic forms and sources — on money, class, and poverty, that complicates the narrative of late-stage capitalism in America. — Erika Meitner
My family left Odesa, Ukraine, in 1991, shortly before I turned nine and the Soviet Union collapsed. We came straight to Los Angeles, with only a brief layover at JFK, where a distant relative bought me my weight in candy bars. Utterly disoriented, I was also fiercely determined to find my footing in English. Years later, footing found, I began to root around for my roots – that is, to fortify my command of my native language and also to connect with kindred spirits among émigrés of the past.
“Soft Kitchen with Tea Towel and Flames” was written across several years and spaces, its “you” shifting and slipping each time I thought I might be close to grasping some clarity. The poem departs right away from an off-the-page occasion of quaint kitchen bliss and crescendos with disaster.
I don’t want to suggest that what motivated me to write a sequence of poems (including “Captainlainberg”) came as part of some orderly process. As with most of my writing, I had a vague sense at first what I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to write plainspoken poems in which the speakers were modelled after neighbors and people from my own past—folks from the rural Midwest.
While “Dance of the Grove Boar” is inspired by Butoh, an experimental form of dance theater in Japan, the piece is neither Ekphrastic nor Didactic. Instead of describing a specific work of Butoh or teaching about this unique art, I translated the body language of Butoh into poetry to convey a message that is still mine. In this way, I pay homage by showing how the language of Butoh is especially adept at conveying certain truths about life.
Her first day on the job at the Garden Café, Ana was stunned at the sight of Cecilia Weber—young and blonde, as tall as a Valkyrie—as she whirled around in the kitchen and said, grinning, “Welcome. Here’s a grater.”
“Nathan Dixon’s Radical Red is so accomplished and fully formed, it’s hard to believe it’s his debut,” Conners said of the winning manuscript. “His stories slip effortlessly back and forth through time and space, challenging us with provocative scenarios while commanding our complete attention until each tale is told. The end result is a collection of overlapping stories that delight, confound, and, ultimately, introduce an important new voice in American fiction.”
“Problems with Words” is a hermit crab essay, a term invented by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola in their book Tell It Slant: Creating, Refining, and Publishing Creative Nonfiction. A hermit crab essay takes on an already existing form of writing the way the hermit crab disguises itself inside the shell of another sea creature.
In Yours, Creature, her fourth full-length collection, Jessica Cuello plays on a common confusion of names: Is Frankenstein the creator or the “Creature”? In Cuello’s imaginative retelling, both. In forty-eight first person epistolary poems—in which Cuello creates a distinctive and credible Regency era voice for Mary Shelley (much as she did for the contemporary child narrators of her prizewinning third collection, Liar)—Cuello traces Shelley’s development as a person, an artist, and a woman from birth to age twenty-five.
Years ago, in the messy wake of what we euphemistically call a “life event”—in my case, the end of a long relationship—at first, in mild shock, I could not continue my daily practices of writing and yoga. One day I stepped back onto the yoga mat, had a good cry, and began writing.
Peter Bennet’s poetry evokes a sense of place and history—in this case, Northumberland , where the poet has lived for most of his life—with such ingenious power that it transcends the specific and provides tools to help us think about the concepts of time and space generally. Leading us through the fells, crags, and shores of his beloved county in northeastern England, Bennet demonstrates that the abstract is best grasped through the particular.
One of these creative bright spots was the release of Drew Pisarra’s new volume of poetry, Periodic Boyfriends. Released in June 2023, Pisarra’s latest sonnet cycle is inspired by the Periodic Table of Elements and the poet’s one-night-stand catalog. Fans of queer poetry may already know Drew Pisarra’s work through his previous poetry collection, Infinity Standing Up (2019) which received favorable reviews in many journals and literary publications including The Washington Post.
I began thinking about writing this poem when Becky my wife and I visited our dear friend at her home on Ireland’s River Shannon. One morning, as the estuary spread before us, I found a fallen bird on the walk beneath the window.
Nikia Chaney is the author of us mouth (University of Hell Press, 2018) and two chapbooks, Sis Fuss (2012, Orange Monkey Publishing) and ladies, please (2012, Dancing Girl Press). She has served as Inlandia Literary Laureate (2016-2018). Her poetry has been published in Sugarhouse Review, 491, Iowa Review, Vinyl, and Pearl, Welter, and Saranac.
Her memoir, ladybug, is upcoming from Inlandia in 2022.
My poem “Metasequoia” came out of moments accumulated over years in a room with art situated on walls and pedestals, all of which I moved and installed at one time or another. In a place devoted to gazes, can any one of them be true? Partition walls were modular, rearranged according to a curator’s wishes, and the color scheme frequently changed.
One of the worst parts of depression, to me, is not wanting anything and just moving like a numb slug through life. So “Anything at All” grew from watching my cat play during lockdown—a time when many if not all of us were sort of reevaluating everything and wondering where to go next.
The poems are written as lists to try to give my reader and I some distance from Mann’s work even as I obsessively explore “what he means.” I wanted to bend Mann to my own will, to make his text like the doctor’s oil painting, something whose surface I could scrutinize and even touch.
Employing epistolary forms, radical lineation, and an almost-violent use of the slash, McLellan’s poems move between lust and fear. They exist in intercepted moments that we, as readers, are allowed to witness; moments where the “you” asks, “. . . do you feel / a part of or apart?”
Eliding incident or back-story, the watertight poems Vincenz has crafted over thirty years and published in over twenty books are usually rigorously compressed, unfriendly to blurted confidences or chatty digressions. In The Pearl Diver of Irunmani, the prosody shaping these austerities derives from the free-verse inventions of the early 20th-century Modernists. A kind of genomic mix of early Stevens and Williams, Vincenz’s verse in this book often deploys a two- or three-stress measure, with syncopated end-stopped, parsed, and enjambed line endings
Julia Guez’s second collection, The Certain Body, is a singular, stunning look at our contemporary moment. It investigates varying experiences with the body: the body as site of illness; the body as locus of experience and time; our relationship to past bodies; how one’s corporality engenders emotional, psychological, and philosophical thoughts; and, ultimately, how the body can continue as a site of pleasure. The Certain Body is a text that deepens upon each reading, demonstrating something unique in contemporary poetry: it is simultaneously a text of the moment, of our time, while invoking the past and also the future.
I couldn’t help thinking about how we carry memories with us and how Virginia Woolf ended her life by walking into the water with stones in her pockets. If each of those stones was a memory, was it one she treasured or one she could not bear to live with? This is a poem beginning full of discrete parts that cannot be broken down any further and then it turns to include knots and knitting, the sense of softness that can create warmth, of something organic that is made even more human by touch and work.
A competing longing for connection and scholarly integrity gives shape to many of these poems, which read like clearings of moving conjecture. Myles searches from the “blurred edge / of my vision,” in a line that is both restless and vibrant, rightly enjambed. “Invocation,” one of the half dozen triplets in this volume, uses the form to spill beyond the usual binary or duality; at the same time, the sentences spool down the page with a crystalline grammatical precision.
I wanted the speaker of the poem to enact a storytelling voice when explaining a very adult thing to their child. I loved the juxtaposition of “Universal Healthcare” and its dryness, with the extended imagery of the birds in the body of the poem.
The speaker of Monroe Lawrence’s book-length poem About to Be Young, totters between the youth that is defined by age and that which is justified by experience—or most often, the lack of it. Rather than follow the typical Bildungsroman tracks, About to Be Young neither begins in youth or ends in maturity, but situates itself, its utterance, in the middle. Not square in the middle, however, but liltingly awry, like the fabled optic splinter that—illogically—refines one’s vision. Think of the figures in Bacon, at once splayed and hermetic, fleshy and all too human.
In 2016 I was only three years clean and had moved back to the city where I used hard drugs from the ages of about 15-24. My earliest years of sobriety I felt cooped up, uninspired. But by then I had a couple clean friends and we shook boredom with urban exploration. We broke into abandoned buildings and studied our town’s history rubbled in the remains.
What does it mean for a woman to be considered a witch? How does the patriarchal image of problematic women as witches endure across history, and into the present day? And how can reclaiming this image become for a contemporary woman a source of resistance and empowerment, without erasing the marks of suffering and loss? These are the concerns of Cindy Veach’s powerful new collection Her Kind.
I think much of my OCD is a learned behavior as much as it is a genetic one. I wanted to capture how anxiety can be imprinted on a child from a parent, especially for unmedicated parents who seek out neither therapy nor medication.
Whether or not it’s an epic, the story I’m telling is certainly a bildungsroman. The speaker, a freshman in college, is attempting to become a poet and she’s simultaneously working as a stripper, and these two enterprises are not as dissimilar as she would like them to be. Even after she stops stripping, she continues to see parallels between life inside and outside the strip club.
I covet the single-mindedness of animals. Bears like Mink aren’t alone in their mysterious ability to orient themselves homeward from unfamiliar faraway places. On spring nights, listen closely and you might hear the whispers of thousands of migratory birds returning to their birthplaces. Some young sea life relinquish control to the ocean currents while other fish migrate by deliberately moving against the currents.
Several years ago I was taking a walk on a dark winter’s evening and hit upon the idea to write about the assassinations, mainly those of John F. Kennedy in 1963, Malcolm X in 1965, and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. I was immediately excited by this idea, but it was vague—because, well, what about them? It’s a big topic, and a concept is not enough.
Granite State’s odyssey began in a library in Massachusetts where I had just finished reading Mark Irwin’s poem “The Human Pageant” (The Massachusetts Review). I stood there, tearing up at the line “I would make a C a vowel because it’s a torn O.” I couldn’t figure out why this was so very sad to me. I went home and started writing about the collapse of the Old Man of the Mountain (also known as “Stone Face” by Abenaki) and how I could never seem to find any of his remains from the highway unless someone pointed him out.
I like poems about food, and I like poems about movies. I also think poets should write about their favorite things, and two of my favorite things are breakfast and Moonstruck. Food is a powerful tool, you know, the ritual of it—even something as simple as an egg-in-a-hole. It pulls the recipient into the orbit of the maker.
Early middle age seems pathetic until you’re there, so now that I’m there, I couldn’t help but reassess Weiland through that lens. At the time, I was already hard at work on an ekphrastic manuscript that was obsessed with how we see and gauge and judge. When I came across the photograph referenced in my poem’s title, the rest was, as we say, history.
“My hometown of York, Pennsylvania is no exception to the crisis of drug overdose deaths. A dear friend, who stayed in my hometown while I left for college, became another casualty in 2016. Not long after, I began receiving scam calls from numbers based in small Pennsylvania towns including Oil City, a real town in the western part of the state known for its ties to petroleum production. I began to imagine the dead were on the other line, even if I never answered.
“All Over Again” was written about three months after my father passed. I was visiting a friend in Mississippi on a property that contained an idyllic pond. I wrote the first draft as I was sitting on the porch looking at the pond. It was a beautiful October day—the sun was shining, the pond was still, there were birds at the water’s edge—but all this beauty seemed to exaggerate my loss by denying it.
The earliest version of “Deliverance as Anchor” was written on 12/28/18, when I was attempting a poem every day after joining a group of writers who did the same. Poets Matthew Schmidt, Chad Foret, and Jillian Etheridge received the stanzaless “I Cite Deliverance But Dad Still Has Bladder Cancer.” Reopening the email, my eyes land on lines I eventually excised: “Slavic dragons / a Polish yule.” The day before, everyone in my family, except for Dad who was immunosuppressed, went to Frederik Meijer Gardens in Grand Rapids, Michigan, touring their annual Worldwide Christmas Trees exhibit, my Italian-Polish heritage personified via made-over deciduous.
Who is the betrayer? Who abandoned whom? Who no longer recognizes whom? Over the years, these questions have surfaced again and again in my writing about immigration, that never-ending journey. I uprooted myself from an island where generations of my family were born, had children, and those children had children, and on and on, even as a strain of migration runs through our veins—Malta, Argentina, Switzerland, the United States, Spain, other regions of Italy. We are our own very diaspora.
I’m thinking of how images outlast images. I was in a room; a man beside me was sketching birds. I pretended to be looking at my phone. Maybe I was even jotting notes in my phone, notes toward a poem, but really I was watching the man sketch the birds. I wanted to talk to the man, ask him to name the birds for me, ask him how he knows to hold his pencil just so, to shade this wing and that, to leave the space that becomes the air around the bird.
I know we wrote the poem “What We Write about When We Don’t Write about the Pandemic” in May of 2020 because I booked an appointment with poet and astrologer Luke Dani Blue on May 18, 2020, the day after you suggested them in your entry. It seems quaint to me that I was already exasperated living through Covid and it was only the second month of it.
Marc Vincenz is a poet-philosopher whose creative practice interrogates consciousness and panpsychism. His poetry makes use of associative techniques that join disparate concepts and challenge the reader to think laterally and widely. The familiar is frequently recontextualized, reframed or re-presented. This means that reading his poetry is often an uncanny experience, involving the metaphorical rewiring of the optic nerve of perception to create new worlds within an almost Schlegelian universe. Vincenz’s poetry connects to Schlegel’s idea of “a dialogue [that] is a chain or garland of fragments”. It is a way of “deep seeing.”
One theme I continue to revisit in my poetry is the way in which masculinity, or toxic masculinity, is learned and expressed through behaviors that are often conditioned by external forces: societal norms, substance abuse, gender stereotypes, family, etc.
I am giving you a version. By which I mean
I mask and I mask and I mask and I mask. I tell myself:
wake up and just wash the dishes. In my new home,
there are frequent hailstorms and the ice falls out
of the sky.
Usually I write with an image or phrase guiding me until I find the poem’s shape based on the discovery I make (structure as a function of content), but I’ve written most often and for so many years about growing up among addiction and how that later affected my single motherhood that it can be difficult to see this content new, though the desire to learn and grow away from dysfunction never fades.
Poems in “the unit” form attempt to simulate or approximate the musical conversation* between instruments in a Free Jazz performance. The language, ideas, and phrases expressed in the poems are representative of the music, notes, and phrases that would be played (heard) in a Free Jazz performance. In this way, the poems might be thought of as either transcriptions of the music, or surreptitious notations that the musicians might use to guide their improvisations. The broad and diverse range of subjects and source materials employed in the poems are characteristic of what urbane, cultured, contemporary, Generation X, multi-ethnic, well-educated, socially conscious artists of the 21st Century United States.
“Nazi Driver” is one of the first ones in which I abandoned all acrobatics meant for the page and returned my focus to sound and rhythm. The thing that first comes to mind when I consider the number of revisions the poem went through, is how much slimmer the column got over time. The result was near consistently an image per line, making the narrative cinematic, the cuts steady, and the pacing in sync with the motion of a train that the narrator can only get on or off, with no scope for further analysis.
Barbara Drake writes directly form the Whitman Tradition. On this 200th anniversary of Whitman’s birth, The Road to Lilac Hill reverently binds the Whitman Tradition in American poetry with the 21st Century.
It was a tricycle, abandoned in some weeds along the river, that prompted this story. In my first draft, I began with section 2, the theft of the trike, and concluded with section 1, the chronological beginning of the tricycle’s history and the saddest of the three sections. I suppose the current order, which is chronological, simplifies things, and since the story is already disjunct, simplifying the chronology seemed like the right choice.
My mother, the poet, Rosemary Cappello, believed in the power of literary journals, and of poetry, to change the world. Of course she was a lover of books, inveterately so, but she reserved a special place on her shelves for literary journals where many voices, many moods commingle; where micro-communities and collectives are forged; where the aura of the times in which we live is marshalled for the sake of future enlightenment.
In “Happiness is a Warm Gun (Summer 1969),” Norman and his brother Murray are learning the ropes of marksmanship at a Boy Scout camp with Tiger Darling, a former Marine, providing instruction. The power dynamic on the shooting range plays as imagined with macho tension provided by Tiger sporting “paratrooper pants and dark shades” in conflict with Norman who aligns himself more with the older boys wearing “tousled hair longer than dad would ever allow…dark shades, like the ones he’d seen in recent pictures of John Lennon…they were from a town called Cohasset, and he figured that place had to be right next to Coolsville.”
Ever since my father handed Neruda’s Isla Negra, he has been one of my favorite poets. This used to be a much longer poem, then I started revising it for more than a month. You just can’t avoid mentioning Neruda’s romantic-erotic tendencies that are prevalent in his oeuvre, hence the poem’s last 4 stanzas.
The poem is not ekphrastic in nature. Instead, I wondered what it’d be like to call a poem after a made-up work of art, to pose as ekphrasis without actually being said. At the time I wrote the first draft of this poem in December 2016, I’d been seeing lots of poems beginning with ‘Landscape’ and thought perhaps I ought to attempt one. I came up with the title first and wrote the poem towards what I thought the painting might look like with such a title.
The desert is deeper than I thought, deeper than thought, that trickster, bait- and-switcher, rabbit snare.
Lately I’ve been feverish, prickly hot and sleepless. None of this work feels like
34. It seems I stand there now, that I’ll continue to stand, long after all has been demolished. Can you see me, erect in the doorframe, white smock over dusky dress—fastened by ribbons, ornamented with crucifix and pocket watch—dark hair parted, perpetually awaiting my students?
by the docks, we go looking for steves frozen key lime pie on a stick covered in raspberry
The poem emerged from a refusal of lines, borders, and boundaries, and it owes this formal energy to dreams, to dreaming—and to the pleasure of instrumentation (or the manner in which a piece is arranged for instruments).
While playing with the form and dispensing his poetic wit, Kevin creates an ecosystem of thought and image, commentary and memory. Over seven pages the first part’s final poem, “Narrative,” includes couplets with passages erased in strikethrough font, section and column breaks, lineated lines and prose sections with stanza breaks written as “[stanza break],” without the actual break.
In Down Low and Lowdown the blues manifests in multiple ways: as lament, as prelude to creativity, taking stock of one’s surroundings, as mourning, as ennui and weariness with life and time.
The birds are talking loudly about the need for reparations. / They say it’s a time whenever their feet touch the ground.
After finishing my debut collection, Dear Specimen, [Beacon Press, 2021,] I wasn’t looking for a radically different way to approach the page, though I was intrigued by contemporary collections that contain visual poetry, such as Diane Khoi Nguyen’s Ghost of, Don Mee Choi’s Mirror Nation, and Paisley Rekdal’s West: A Translation. After revisiting these collections, I realized that the four italicized lines which are left justified at the bottom of “Crossfire Highway” (OSR Vol. 13, No. 1) deserve a more imaginative setting than I’d given them.
I first started writing this poem as an experiment to try to explore my relationship with religion. I come from a Hindu family, and I was given one of the names of God, but even now, when I am asked what it means, I am not always sure what to say. What does it mean to have a name that holds such divine force, to carry that with me for the entirety of my life?
I wrote the first two-thirds of this “sonnet of sonnets of another poet’s lines” in 2017—it was the beginning of a time in which my sense of what makes a poem completely shattered. Though it might seem as if the italicized lines of Delmore Schwartz are some play of pastiche, they’re more like porticos under which I felt I could hide from the storm of my own lines coalescing, or not.
A quote from George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman hangs in my kitchen which reads “There is no love sincerer than the love of food” and I think that tends to be true. I love food, perhaps more than I should and I have spent many a day on a barroom stool with a pile of wings in front of me.
It’s very difficult for me to understand the people, events, circumstances, and cultural detritus of my life without giving them a shape through writing. And I don’t say this as a point of pride. It’s just a fact, a fact that can be pretty inconvenient, since writing takes time, aloneness, and deep concentration, and because I have difficulty expressing myself in other ways.
I have slowly come to the realization that healing and closure are not possible for me, especially when such losses occurred early in my childhood. There is this scar that I have, this “hole in my stomach,” and I just have to learn to acknowledge and accept that it will always be a part of me.
The Pacific swallows up the two boys. The surreal wailing of the mothers and the imaginary journey of the boys deep into the water fills the opening stanzas but quickly shifts to the transformation of the environment, the story. The boys become the boy/boyhood of the speaker. The past, still present creating the now of the narrative. All an act of Telekinesis, the psychic ability allowing an individual to influence a physical system without physical interaction.
lately I’ve been thinking of poetry as one of the first recording devices…and you ask yourself, What shall I record? And how shall I make it pleasing? And I am drawn to some of the more intense experiences I’ve had, many of which were pleasantly dumb
“Snow” is also a piece of a larger, work-in-progress series of stories. Winter in a northern village vanishes overnight and is replaced by a scorching heat. At first, the world melts—streams and the village lake swell, roads wash away, basements fill. As the heat lingers, the world dries out—streams disappear, mud becomes dust, the lake recedes so much that the villagers wonder if it will be lost forever.
“Disappearing Act” borrows its title from the artist Bruce Nauman’s 2019 exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. I’m often inspired by art in all its forms, but this is one MoMA show that I just happened to stumble upon, knowing nothing about Nauman. His unsettling, multimedia installation affected me deeply, although at the time I didn’t understand my reaction. I recall walking down a corridor with unseen audio speakers, overlapping voices reciting the days of the week out of order.
John Hoppenthaler’s books of poetry are Night Wing Over Metropolitan Area, Domestic Garden, Anticipate the Coming Reservoir, and Lives of Water, all with Carnegie Mellon UP. With Kazim, Ali, he has co-edited a volume of essays on the poetry of Jean Valentine, This-World Company (U of Michigan P).
I’m not sure why the word “vicarious” brings to mind, for me, what it does, but when I hear it, I think first of the way that people taking photos pull the face they want the person on the other side of the camera to pull. Or the way parents try to get their babies to eat baby food by closing their lips around mouthfuls of air. Or how when a kid recites or reads something, if you love that kid and you know the words, you mouth them silently too.
I was inspired to write this poem by two poets, Rachel Mennies and Marie Howe. I loved the way Mennies, in her book, The Naomi Letters, would focus on a tiny word—one little word—and how it can change everything: relationships, not only for the speaker, but maybe for the reader as well. I focused on the word “but” when used in an apology, and how it negates that apology. What I’ve always admired in Marie Howe’s work is her ability to resist metaphor.
We are beyond ecstatic to have Tomashi Jackson’s Blessed Be the Rock for the cover of the 2024 Ocean State Review, a work that perfectly captures our aesthetic and the myriad contributors featured in the issue.
Zebrun’s characters, far from the pomp and ceremony of the Vatican, are the Italian and Irish working men and women of New York. In the modest homes, watering holes, and places of work and worship one is far more likely to encounter miracles, real discoveries, real forgiveness, real revelation—real creatures in need of nutrition, safety, and, at times, sanctuary.
“Lately I’ve been practicing to stay.” says the speaker in the prologue poem, “What the Sea Told Me.” And from there, as if on a tidal current, we are drawn into and out of worlds of water: sand, seafoam, flotsam, mammals, amphibians, fish, and crustaceans swirl around us. Eyre brings us close to what requires resolve and what needs resolving: how not to wreak havoc on this earth we clearly love; how to plumb the cells of our own bodies for memories of connection; ways to engage with the rest of nature but do no harm.
Nick Rees Gardner’s linked stories portray people as they are: alternately hilarious, desperate, resilient, broken. For the characters contained in Delinquents, the crux is determining which they’ll be when the music stops.
The baby in “Uncanny” could be a newborn or a poem—it tracks the amazement we bring to a creation that we’ve had little nothing to do with! The baby (who in literal reading is my artist-daughter) seemed to arrive fully formed years ago. One liminal night I realized that the adult child she’d become was also beyond me, and the poem slipped out.
Though not esoteric, the poems are certainly not easy either. They are by turns abstract and concrete, tender and brutal, glib and sincere. They don’t orbit a theme so much as they draw in a variety of themes by their own gravity. This gravity, their indelible weight, is the key strength to this impressively short yet epic book. Each poem is a dent in spacetime, and everything that crosses their event horizons is sucked in. This includes the reader’s interest.
Pui Ying Wong’s book of poems, Fanling in October, is both restrained and deeply surprising. She is a traveler, not just across borders, but across history, her own ancestry and that of others, in search of home—past, present, and future.
Loop Light awhile under the door then gone then you out into the dawn and then me back asleep.
Unfiltered and full of dark humor, desire, and sexual energy, Southwick’s debut poetry collection, Orchid Alpha, unpacks the id of the modern day woman. The speaker flirts with the edges of gender constructs and social boundaries, between “being good” and inviting indiscretion. Played out in acrylic bathtubs and hotel bars, on hay farms, in the midst of psilocybin hills, ghost tours, and alone on blown up air mattresses, it isn’t always sex that’s desired but rather connection, excitement, and a giving in to “the wilderness, [as] it enfolds me, & I consent” (80).
The forward slash is used, of course, to indicate a line break when writing about poetry and since forward slashes are used throughout, “A Baton”—one of the few dualities—I will write out “(line break)” and consequently “(stanza break)” to honor the use of the forward slash in the poem.
Every Single Bird Rising is this poet’s second language. Xiaoly Li’s debut collection is both weightless and heavy, depending on the line your eyes end up lingering on. What I love about this collection is this text presents some challenges as a writer: I cannot tell you who I am without telling you about the Cultural Revolution.
Almost a decade ago, when I was in the thick of writing the first drafts of “The Itch” and the other linked stories in Radical Red, I scored a gig teaching “Humor Writing” and “The Hero’s Journey” over the summer at the Duke Young Writer’s Camp. I was qualified to teach the latter because I had read some Joseph Campbell; the former because I had cracked a couple of jokes during my interview.
From October 2019 to May 2020, poet Sean Singer and I wrote variously lined stanzas back and forth between where he was in New York and where I was in British Columbia and Arizona. Sean’s and my irregular-at-first correspondence took on special meaning and gained intensity during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic when we wrote the majority of the lines in the thirty-seven-page Google Doc we made together.
There’s much discourse around Marie Kondo. Something about the ill effects of late capitalism being assigned to the individual or choice rubs people the wrong way. Still, some of us desire order, control, some meaning in materialism. During a particularly nasty fire season, when the air was full of other people’s debris, I thought of her and I thought of Tracy K. Smith’s “The Weather in Space.”
I’ve witnessed our pup’s prolonged, soft wailing on only two occasions. The first was on his initial evening away from his mother and littermates, nestled on my lap. The second occurrence is depicted within this poem.
Kimberly Ann Southwick is an Aries with a Capricorn Moon & Ascendant. She is the founder & editor in chief of the literary arts journal GIGANTIC SEQUINS, which has been in print since 2009. Her debut full-length poetry collection, ORCHID ALPHA, is out via Trembling Pillow Press as of April 2023.
When writing a series of poems about toxic masculinity’s impact on climate change, I conceived of a nameless character simply referred to as “the hooligan”—a somewhat feral individual who lives at the farther edges of American society, who in some ways acts as a symbolic representation for the wild and chaotic within all of us.
You know what it’s like. Salt Solutions. Buffers. Relationships. Whatever works.
This poem was written after I moved overseas for the second time and was feeling very uprooted. I had a file on my computer of family photos that was transferred to me by a family member, and I loved going through them for hours in an attempt to ground myself to a specific time and place, but to also distract from the vast changes my life required.
CONGRATS TO THE OCEAN STATE REVIEW’S 2024 PUSHCART PRIZE NOMINEES…
Deep pandemic days, fans blowing, windows open, temperatures checked, hands clean, my students masked or streaming little squares on my laptop, I taught Keats as I’ve done for years. I teach every ninth grader in the private school, every student reading this poem pursuing the hope of art and beauty against the weight of loss. Keats, sick with sorrow tells us, “my heart aches” and then tells us why: the groaning old men, young men growing thin with sickness, Keats’s own brother, and too soon, Keats himself, writ in water.
I lost someone I loved very much. One of the last meals we ever had together was homemade potato soup. The roof of his attic leaked whenever it stormed, which resulted in the kitchen’s ceiling light sometimes filling with water. I fell into a deep depression shortly after this person’s unexpected passing. After he passed, I began writing feverishly for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic.
The feet are earth And transform Fear into power. The legs are fire And transform anger Into power.
I had already been wrangling with the urge to write about Tiresias as a trans/gender non-conforming figure. The two ideas merged in this poem, which originated as a prose form in response to Carson’s piece and also used a dialogue with a mother. Did Tiresias have a good relationship with his mother? Do seers even have mothers? Or do they spring up from the underworld fully-formed and spouting prophecy?
“While Thinking of Another’s Suffering” is one of seventy poems written for my first collection about an Angolan woman named Angela who arrived in Jamestown, Virginia, in August of 1619, more than a year before the Mayflower arrived in the North.
Jane Satterfield’s newest collection of poems, The Badass Brontës, reimagines the lives of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë, nineteenth-century sisters and authors who published under male pseudonyms and spent much of their short lives in their father’s parsonage on the Yorkshire moors. Often focusing on middle sister Emily, poet and author of Wuthering Heights, Satterfield’s poems probe our continued obsession with these sister-authors, lyrically exploring the details of their biographies and their cultural afterlives.
Sum Ledger is a powerful and wide-ranging meditation — via a dazzling array of poetic forms and sources — on money, class, and poverty, that complicates the narrative of late-stage capitalism in America. — Erika Meitner
My family left Odesa, Ukraine, in 1991, shortly before I turned nine and the Soviet Union collapsed. We came straight to Los Angeles, with only a brief layover at JFK, where a distant relative bought me my weight in candy bars. Utterly disoriented, I was also fiercely determined to find my footing in English. Years later, footing found, I began to root around for my roots – that is, to fortify my command of my native language and also to connect with kindred spirits among émigrés of the past.
“Soft Kitchen with Tea Towel and Flames” was written across several years and spaces, its “you” shifting and slipping each time I thought I might be close to grasping some clarity. The poem departs right away from an off-the-page occasion of quaint kitchen bliss and crescendos with disaster.
I don’t want to suggest that what motivated me to write a sequence of poems (including “Captainlainberg”) came as part of some orderly process. As with most of my writing, I had a vague sense at first what I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to write plainspoken poems in which the speakers were modelled after neighbors and people from my own past—folks from the rural Midwest.
While “Dance of the Grove Boar” is inspired by Butoh, an experimental form of dance theater in Japan, the piece is neither Ekphrastic nor Didactic. Instead of describing a specific work of Butoh or teaching about this unique art, I translated the body language of Butoh into poetry to convey a message that is still mine. In this way, I pay homage by showing how the language of Butoh is especially adept at conveying certain truths about life.
Her first day on the job at the Garden Café, Ana was stunned at the sight of Cecilia Weber—young and blonde, as tall as a Valkyrie—as she whirled around in the kitchen and said, grinning, “Welcome. Here’s a grater.”
“Nathan Dixon’s Radical Red is so accomplished and fully formed, it’s hard to believe it’s his debut,” Conners said of the winning manuscript. “His stories slip effortlessly back and forth through time and space, challenging us with provocative scenarios while commanding our complete attention until each tale is told. The end result is a collection of overlapping stories that delight, confound, and, ultimately, introduce an important new voice in American fiction.”
“Problems with Words” is a hermit crab essay, a term invented by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola in their book Tell It Slant: Creating, Refining, and Publishing Creative Nonfiction. A hermit crab essay takes on an already existing form of writing the way the hermit crab disguises itself inside the shell of another sea creature.
In Yours, Creature, her fourth full-length collection, Jessica Cuello plays on a common confusion of names: Is Frankenstein the creator or the “Creature”? In Cuello’s imaginative retelling, both. In forty-eight first person epistolary poems—in which Cuello creates a distinctive and credible Regency era voice for Mary Shelley (much as she did for the contemporary child narrators of her prizewinning third collection, Liar)—Cuello traces Shelley’s development as a person, an artist, and a woman from birth to age twenty-five.
Years ago, in the messy wake of what we euphemistically call a “life event”—in my case, the end of a long relationship—at first, in mild shock, I could not continue my daily practices of writing and yoga. One day I stepped back onto the yoga mat, had a good cry, and began writing.
Peter Bennet’s poetry evokes a sense of place and history—in this case, Northumberland , where the poet has lived for most of his life—with such ingenious power that it transcends the specific and provides tools to help us think about the concepts of time and space generally. Leading us through the fells, crags, and shores of his beloved county in northeastern England, Bennet demonstrates that the abstract is best grasped through the particular.
One of these creative bright spots was the release of Drew Pisarra’s new volume of poetry, Periodic Boyfriends. Released in June 2023, Pisarra’s latest sonnet cycle is inspired by the Periodic Table of Elements and the poet’s one-night-stand catalog. Fans of queer poetry may already know Drew Pisarra’s work through his previous poetry collection, Infinity Standing Up (2019) which received favorable reviews in many journals and literary publications including The Washington Post.
I began thinking about writing this poem when Becky my wife and I visited our dear friend at her home on Ireland’s River Shannon. One morning, as the estuary spread before us, I found a fallen bird on the walk beneath the window.
Nikia Chaney is the author of us mouth (University of Hell Press, 2018) and two chapbooks, Sis Fuss (2012, Orange Monkey Publishing) and ladies, please (2012, Dancing Girl Press). She has served as Inlandia Literary Laureate (2016-2018). Her poetry has been published in Sugarhouse Review, 491, Iowa Review, Vinyl, and Pearl, Welter, and Saranac. Her memoir, ladybug, is upcoming from Inlandia in 2022.
My poem “Metasequoia” came out of moments accumulated over years in a room with art situated on walls and pedestals, all of which I moved and installed at one time or another. In a place devoted to gazes, can any one of them be true? Partition walls were modular, rearranged according to a curator’s wishes, and the color scheme frequently changed.
One of the worst parts of depression, to me, is not wanting anything and just moving like a numb slug through life. So “Anything at All” grew from watching my cat play during lockdown—a time when many if not all of us were sort of reevaluating everything and wondering where to go next.
The poems are written as lists to try to give my reader and I some distance from Mann’s work even as I obsessively explore “what he means.” I wanted to bend Mann to my own will, to make his text like the doctor’s oil painting, something whose surface I could scrutinize and even touch.
Employing epistolary forms, radical lineation, and an almost-violent use of the slash, McLellan’s poems move between lust and fear. They exist in intercepted moments that we, as readers, are allowed to witness; moments where the “you” asks, “. . . do you feel / a part of or apart?”
Eliding incident or back-story, the watertight poems Vincenz has crafted over thirty years and published in over twenty books are usually rigorously compressed, unfriendly to blurted confidences or chatty digressions. In The Pearl Diver of Irunmani, the prosody shaping these austerities derives from the free-verse inventions of the early 20th-century Modernists. A kind of genomic mix of early Stevens and Williams, Vincenz’s verse in this book often deploys a two- or three-stress measure, with syncopated end-stopped, parsed, and enjambed line endings
Julia Guez’s second collection, The Certain Body, is a singular, stunning look at our contemporary moment. It investigates varying experiences with the body: the body as site of illness; the body as locus of experience and time; our relationship to past bodies; how one’s corporality engenders emotional, psychological, and philosophical thoughts; and, ultimately, how the body can continue as a site of pleasure. The Certain Body is a text that deepens upon each reading, demonstrating something unique in contemporary poetry: it is simultaneously a text of the moment, of our time, while invoking the past and also the future.
PAST CONTRIBUTOR SPOTLIGHT: DANIELLE COONEY, “MY CATULLUS, WELL, HE STILL…
I couldn’t help thinking about how we carry memories with us and how Virginia Woolf ended her life by walking into the water with stones in her pockets. If each of those stones was a memory, was it one she treasured or one she could not bear to live with? This is a poem beginning full of discrete parts that cannot be broken down any further and then it turns to include knots and knitting, the sense of softness that can create warmth, of something organic that is made even more human by touch and work.
A competing longing for connection and scholarly integrity gives shape to many of these poems, which read like clearings of moving conjecture. Myles searches from the “blurred edge / of my vision,” in a line that is both restless and vibrant, rightly enjambed. “Invocation,” one of the half dozen triplets in this volume, uses the form to spill beyond the usual binary or duality; at the same time, the sentences spool down the page with a crystalline grammatical precision.
I wanted the speaker of the poem to enact a storytelling voice when explaining a very adult thing to their child. I loved the juxtaposition of “Universal Healthcare” and its dryness, with the extended imagery of the birds in the body of the poem.
The speaker of Monroe Lawrence’s book-length poem About to Be Young, totters between the youth that is defined by age and that which is justified by experience—or most often, the lack of it. Rather than follow the typical Bildungsroman tracks, About to Be Young neither begins in youth or ends in maturity, but situates itself, its utterance, in the middle. Not square in the middle, however, but liltingly awry, like the fabled optic splinter that—illogically—refines one’s vision. Think of the figures in Bacon, at once splayed and hermetic, fleshy and all too human.
In 2016 I was only three years clean and had moved back to the city where I used hard drugs from the ages of about 15-24. My earliest years of sobriety I felt cooped up, uninspired. But by then I had a couple clean friends and we shook boredom with urban exploration. We broke into abandoned buildings and studied our town’s history rubbled in the remains.
What does it mean for a woman to be considered a witch? How does the patriarchal image of problematic women as witches endure across history, and into the present day? And how can reclaiming this image become for a contemporary woman a source of resistance and empowerment, without erasing the marks of suffering and loss? These are the concerns of Cindy Veach’s powerful new collection Her Kind.
I think much of my OCD is a learned behavior as much as it is a genetic one. I wanted to capture how anxiety can be imprinted on a child from a parent, especially for unmedicated parents who seek out neither therapy nor medication.
Whether or not it’s an epic, the story I’m telling is certainly a bildungsroman. The speaker, a freshman in college, is attempting to become a poet and she’s simultaneously working as a stripper, and these two enterprises are not as dissimilar as she would like them to be. Even after she stops stripping, she continues to see parallels between life inside and outside the strip club.
I covet the single-mindedness of animals. Bears like Mink aren’t alone in their mysterious ability to orient themselves homeward from unfamiliar faraway places. On spring nights, listen closely and you might hear the whispers of thousands of migratory birds returning to their birthplaces. Some young sea life relinquish control to the ocean currents while other fish migrate by deliberately moving against the currents.
Several years ago I was taking a walk on a dark winter’s evening and hit upon the idea to write about the assassinations, mainly those of John F. Kennedy in 1963, Malcolm X in 1965, and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. I was immediately excited by this idea, but it was vague—because, well, what about them? It’s a big topic, and a concept is not enough.
Granite State’s odyssey began in a library in Massachusetts where I had just finished reading Mark Irwin’s poem “The Human Pageant” (The Massachusetts Review). I stood there, tearing up at the line “I would make a C a vowel because it’s a torn O.” I couldn’t figure out why this was so very sad to me. I went home and started writing about the collapse of the Old Man of the Mountain (also known as “Stone Face” by Abenaki) and how I could never seem to find any of his remains from the highway unless someone pointed him out.
I like poems about food, and I like poems about movies. I also think poets should write about their favorite things, and two of my favorite things are breakfast and Moonstruck. Food is a powerful tool, you know, the ritual of it—even something as simple as an egg-in-a-hole. It pulls the recipient into the orbit of the maker.
Early middle age seems pathetic until you’re there, so now that I’m there, I couldn’t help but reassess Weiland through that lens. At the time, I was already hard at work on an ekphrastic manuscript that was obsessed with how we see and gauge and judge. When I came across the photograph referenced in my poem’s title, the rest was, as we say, history.
“My hometown of York, Pennsylvania is no exception to the crisis of drug overdose deaths. A dear friend, who stayed in my hometown while I left for college, became another casualty in 2016. Not long after, I began receiving scam calls from numbers based in small Pennsylvania towns including Oil City, a real town in the western part of the state known for its ties to petroleum production. I began to imagine the dead were on the other line, even if I never answered.
“All Over Again” was written about three months after my father passed. I was visiting a friend in Mississippi on a property that contained an idyllic pond. I wrote the first draft as I was sitting on the porch looking at the pond. It was a beautiful October day—the sun was shining, the pond was still, there were birds at the water’s edge—but all this beauty seemed to exaggerate my loss by denying it.
The earliest version of “Deliverance as Anchor” was written on 12/28/18, when I was attempting a poem every day after joining a group of writers who did the same. Poets Matthew Schmidt, Chad Foret, and Jillian Etheridge received the stanzaless “I Cite Deliverance But Dad Still Has Bladder Cancer.” Reopening the email, my eyes land on lines I eventually excised: “Slavic dragons / a Polish yule.” The day before, everyone in my family, except for Dad who was immunosuppressed, went to Frederik Meijer Gardens in Grand Rapids, Michigan, touring their annual Worldwide Christmas Trees exhibit, my Italian-Polish heritage personified via made-over deciduous.
Who is the betrayer? Who abandoned whom? Who no longer recognizes whom? Over the years, these questions have surfaced again and again in my writing about immigration, that never-ending journey. I uprooted myself from an island where generations of my family were born, had children, and those children had children, and on and on, even as a strain of migration runs through our veins—Malta, Argentina, Switzerland, the United States, Spain, other regions of Italy. We are our own very diaspora.
I’m thinking of how images outlast images. I was in a room; a man beside me was sketching birds. I pretended to be looking at my phone. Maybe I was even jotting notes in my phone, notes toward a poem, but really I was watching the man sketch the birds. I wanted to talk to the man, ask him to name the birds for me, ask him how he knows to hold his pencil just so, to shade this wing and that, to leave the space that becomes the air around the bird.
I know we wrote the poem “What We Write about When We Don’t Write about the Pandemic” in May of 2020 because I booked an appointment with poet and astrologer Luke Dani Blue on May 18, 2020, the day after you suggested them in your entry. It seems quaint to me that I was already exasperated living through Covid and it was only the second month of it.
Marc Vincenz is a poet-philosopher whose creative practice interrogates consciousness and panpsychism. His poetry makes use of associative techniques that join disparate concepts and challenge the reader to think laterally and widely. The familiar is frequently recontextualized, reframed or re-presented. This means that reading his poetry is often an uncanny experience, involving the metaphorical rewiring of the optic nerve of perception to create new worlds within an almost Schlegelian universe. Vincenz’s poetry connects to Schlegel’s idea of “a dialogue [that] is a chain or garland of fragments”. It is a way of “deep seeing.”
One theme I continue to revisit in my poetry is the way in which masculinity, or toxic masculinity, is learned and expressed through behaviors that are often conditioned by external forces: societal norms, substance abuse, gender stereotypes, family, etc.
I am giving you a version. By which I mean I mask and I mask and I mask and I mask. I tell myself: wake up and just wash the dishes. In my new home, there are frequent hailstorms and the ice falls out of the sky.
The occasion for “The God Machine” was a ringing in my office.
Usually I write with an image or phrase guiding me until I find the poem’s shape based on the discovery I make (structure as a function of content), but I’ve written most often and for so many years about growing up among addiction and how that later affected my single motherhood that it can be difficult to see this content new, though the desire to learn and grow away from dysfunction never fades.
Poems in “the unit” form attempt to simulate or approximate the musical conversation* between instruments in a Free Jazz performance. The language, ideas, and phrases expressed in the poems are representative of the music, notes, and phrases that would be played (heard) in a Free Jazz performance. In this way, the poems might be thought of as either transcriptions of the music, or surreptitious notations that the musicians might use to guide their improvisations. The broad and diverse range of subjects and source materials employed in the poems are characteristic of what urbane, cultured, contemporary, Generation X, multi-ethnic, well-educated, socially conscious artists of the 21st Century United States.
“Nazi Driver” is one of the first ones in which I abandoned all acrobatics meant for the page and returned my focus to sound and rhythm. The thing that first comes to mind when I consider the number of revisions the poem went through, is how much slimmer the column got over time. The result was near consistently an image per line, making the narrative cinematic, the cuts steady, and the pacing in sync with the motion of a train that the narrator can only get on or off, with no scope for further analysis.
Barbara Drake writes directly form the Whitman Tradition. On this 200th anniversary of Whitman’s birth, The Road to Lilac Hill reverently binds the Whitman Tradition in American poetry with the 21st Century.