Hybrid Taxidermy
Eric Vrooman
During the first half of the hurricane, they barbecued duck on the cinderblock patio, the house shielding them from western winds. They watched a transformer explode, shingles fly, and trees—not just saplings but full-grown live oaks, crape-myrtles, and magnolias—touch the…
Death by 0s and 1s: The Fate of Paper Manuscripts and Drafts
Kevin Stein
The widespread use of computer and digital media is transforming not only how poets compose their work but also how they preserve it, or fail to. Denizens of the digital age, we inhabit an historical moment where much exists only…
For Form’s Sake: X. J. Kennedy’s In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus: New and Selected Poems, 1955 – 2007
Zach Savich
John Hopkins University Press, $18.95 (paperback) Because he writes poems that use meter and rhyme, X. J. Kennedy might seem to belong with those recent formalists— James Merrill, Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht—who could make the well-wrought urn of a poem,…
New York, New York, New York, New York, New York
Catie Rosemurgy
Our souls too big for us, our laugh, hands, sex too big for us, we’re coming, dragging excess skin that looks, in dim light, like flowers. Coming to tear you down whenever our eyes close. Coming, when they startle open,…
Review of Mary Jo Salter’s A Phone Call to the Future: New & Selected Poems
Jessica Johnson
Alfred A. Knopf, $26.95 (hardcover) Reading Mary Jo Salter can be like taking a walk with a very bright friend who has a knack for the well-told anecdote, the vivid confidence. This effect is due in part to her narrative…
Some Weather
Vona Groarke
Among the things (though these are not things) I did to preempt the storm were: upturn, stow, disconnect, shut down, shutter, shut. But, while the house sulked, the sky scolded and I observed an hour’s breadth, the storm tossed out…
Beatitude
Kelly Loy Gilbert
Once I was alive apart from law; but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died. Once, before I was even formed in my mother’s womb, God knew and loved me; before I was born he set…
Poetry Influences the World
Shai Dotan
My wife grew a beak. I think the poetry did it I might have exaggerated a bit with the bird metaphor. See, I told her, poetry influences the world. Was she offended. She didn’t express it with words, but a…
Citrus
Nick Courtright
I have shut off the grove, and the light. For once I allow the night its effect on every bowing branch. When I say you are enormous, I mean you are the tree. On the path the dogs have come…
Ars Poetica with Vulture
Colin Cheney
Researching a poem-diclofenac’s chemical chain, for arthritis-to explain thousands of white-backed vultures, & the owls who eat what the first carrion birds leave on the skinned cattle shot full of the stuff, found dead in India, I began to speak…
