Three Poems
Anna Journey
Last Nostalgia Starting with a Piece of Spider Plant on our Car’s Backseat
You moved clippings of your childhood spider plant
with us in a Ziploc half-filled with tap water
…
Prayer
Natalie Mesnard
I am telling you, first of all, that your husband will be beautiful, but he will be a man who will love you then stand out on the stoop, the red eye of a cigarette sighing between his lips, his shoulders slumped as he sucks smoke in a state of unexplainable melancholy.…
An Arch Under the Instep: Sven Birkertsʼ The Other Walk
Amy Wright
Readers of Sven Birkertsʼ Editorʼs Notes in AGNI will be familiar with the value he places on contemplation. Whether his subject is the Jeopardy face-off between man and machine or cyber-fantasia, he studies it with a mode of thought often associated with religious orders.…
The Ivy Power: Don Lee’s The Collective
Ryan McDermott
In The Collective, the most recent installment of the American campus novel, Don Lee presents a group of Asian American artists whose coming-of-age is marked by an irresolvable conflict: the tug-of-war between self-identity and community.…
Speculation on the History of Drawing; Speculation on the Little Ice Age
Eric Pankey
Speculation on the History of Drawing
The tool,
A burnt stick,
Extends the body
…
The Unreasoning Mask: The Shared Interior Architecture of Poetry and Memoir
Jill Bialosky
Years ago when I first thought I might write about my sister’s suicide in prose, but had no idea how to approach it, I asked the essayist and poet Thomas Lynch, who wrote The Undertaking, a wonderful book about dying…
On Suddenly, A Knock on the Door by Etgar Keret
Jane Rose Porter
“There’s a theory that says there are billions of other universes, parallel to the one we live in, and that each of them is slightly different,” the first-person narrator of Etgar Keret’s short story “Parallel Universes” begins.…
Wasteland, Wasteland, Wasteland
Claire Vaye Watkins
The binder does not say “mole men.” The mole men are a rumor, a legend. So the old, empinkened blind man with the puckered skin and long, translucent, prehensile whiskers we found in the desert near the Repository is not…
All Or None
Randall Jarrell
From The Kenyon Review, Spring 1951, Vol. XIII, No. 2 Each year, just as the blossoms Fall, and the buds curl from the boughs, I hear from the sky a wondering voice: The brass bird that drowses All year on…
Swiss National Day in Lavigny
Michael Hulse
Cities burn, favelas rot, the starving walk for water,
elections are rigged and revolutions hijacked,
tanks are deployed against the people—but
here the children walk with lanterns…
Dear Cousin
Tara Goedjen
From the jungle they watch her, but she doesn’t know this. She sits on the third-story verandah with her monkey, Don Sergio de Ferdinand, who fiddles with her birthstone. Sergio spits apple and leaps into the branches of a nearby tree. …
On Art and Katrina: Brad Richard’s Motion Studies
Joelle Biele
Brad Richard is a man obsessed. Obsessed with paintings, obsessed with drawings, obsessed with photography.…
“A Thought Turned to Stone”: David Madden’s London Bridge in Plague and Fire
Gerald Duff
David Madden’s thirteenth book of fiction is a daringly imagined mythology of London Bridge—its conception by Peter de Colechurch, its construction, its meaning in history, both metaphorical and literal, and its core relevance to Great Britain and its empire.…
Hunger to Hunger:
Hungry / Foame
An Introduction
David Baker
Poems don’t begin. Poems continue.
A poet may sit with pen and paper, or a blue-faced computer screen, and write that first word, but spinning in the poet’s head is a symphony of sounds and impulses, and preceding that first textual mark is a whole history of previous uses of that “first” word.…
Hunger to Hunger:
Hungry / Foame
Click on the thumbnails below to view full-size versions of each poem and follow the progression of project between both languages. Note “Hungry” originally appeared in The Atlantic Monthly and was subsequently collected in Never-Ending Birds (W. W. Norton, 2009).…
Elaine of Corbenic, Lancelot’s Baby-Momma, Meets Guinevere at the Employee Picnic; Lancelot Questions the Clairvoyant
Shelley Puhak
Elaine of Corbenic, Lancelot’s Baby-Momma, Meets Guinevere at the Employee Picnic
Ginny, don’t you know even the side dish
brings his own side dish to the picnic?
We met at some mouth: a tunnel, a river.
…
Man in Circles
Nancy Zafris
Lately I am overcome with fatigue. I am too tired for sexual intercourse. Nor can I read a magazine article about it. I cannot call across a tavern counter with any kind of greeting, even to the bartender. …
The Door
Marsha McGregor
The ad in the paper said a new chain restaurant was opening. Apply in person between the hours of eleven and one. I got permission to leave school early to interview. I think I borrowed my boyfriend’s car. I was sixteen.…
His City Repeats Itself: Wayne Miller’s The City, Our City
Micah Bateman
Wayne Miller’s third book of poems, The City, Our City, is a meditation on metropolitanism occasioned, as Miller has said in interviews, by the American press’s incorrect thinking about red states and blue states. …
In that Ohio
Ursula K. Le Guin
From The Kenyon Review, New Series, Spring, 1987, Vol. IX, No. 2 They ring bells in the marshes, little bells in the evening in choruses. It is trilling season. A bird before sunrise sings B, B-flat, B, over and over…
Ode to the Tiny, Red, Stupid Bugs That Cluster on My Mailbox; Ode to the Male Honeybee; Ode to the Love Bug
Andrew Kozma
Ode to the Tiny, Red, Stupid Bugs That Cluster on My Mailbox
Blind to danger and to neglect, you pack yourselves
onto the edges of your metal lawn and wait.
…
Even in Paradise, Someone Will Be Bluffing . . .
Ersi Sotiropoulos
He always hoped for a warm welcome when he came home from the office, and would ring the downstairs doorbell to announce he was on his way up. He pressed the button for the lift, shifting the weight of the bags on his shoulder to get a better balance, and in the little hall mirror his face was invariably smiling and good-humored.…
The Dangers of Enchantment: Heather Christle’s The Trees The Trees
Rachel Abramowitz
The Trees The Trees, Heather Christle’s widely lauded, Believer Poetry Award-winning second book of poems, will bother you. Its fragmented lines will visit you in dreams; when you wake they will pull you back into a discombobulated psychic somnambulance.…
The Voice Under the Voice of Every Casual Word: Tom Sleigh’s Army Cats
Mira Rosenthal
In his 2006 book of essays Interview with a Ghost, the poet Tom Sleigh gives us his ideal approach to writing: “to make a poem too messy to be thought of as an artifact, and too wrestled with and considered to be condescended to as process.” …
On the Distance
of the Painter’s Arm
Hilary Vaughn Dobel
I still have to explain how
the first time I undressed a man,
he was half-drowned and hypothermic.
I regarded the two of us, me slicing…
My Father’s Hand
H.V. Chao
My father was not a man to show anger, but to hold it in. He did the same with pain. When his mother died, he must have mentioned it at dinner. Maybe it was a month later that I snuck into his room, I can’t remember—long enough that the death of a woman I’d never met had slipped my mind.…
The Smallest Space:
Lyric Aphorism
in Contemporary Poetry
Hannah Brooks-Motl
I. In “Man Carrying Thing” Wallace Stevens made one of his most infamous declarations: “The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully.” Those lines can seem to describe, and have been used to support, a view of contemporary poetry…
Domestic Threat: Lucia Perillo’s On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths
John James
Lucia Perillo’s most recent collection of poems, On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths, builds on the eclectic assortment of characters and observations from 2009’s Inseminating the Elephant.…
Castalian Spring
Seamus Heaney
Thunderface. Not Zeus’s ire, but hers Refusing entry, and mine mounting from it. This one thing I had vowed: to drink the waters Of the Castalian Spring, to arrogate That much to myself and be the poet Under the god…
