theKalliope

Category: Spectacular Poems

  • “Entry,” by Amie Zimmeran

    I should be clear at the opening. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be entering in Amie Zimmerman’s poem, “Entry” (the second of the two published in Mercury Firs 4 is what I’m writing about here). Like is the poem marking each of the situations as places where a reader could enter? Is it…

  • “Feldhase,” by Kylan Rice

    My frame for Kylan Rice’s poetry will always be the piece I read in Colorado Review last year. “Shield or Bee” is this remarkable exercise in density and the sound of density and the sound when making sense amidst a dense phrasing. Like what I could imagine a bee doing. But the poem isn’t “in…

  • “Amanuensis,” by Danika Stegeman

    In my recent goodreads review of Anthony Madrid’s Whatever’s Forbidden the Wise, I wrote about that moment in poetry workshops where someone comments that the poem could be read as the writer’s ars poetica. And depending on the mood, it can feel like, yeah, thank you for that reasonably dull comment. Or it could be…

  • “Ekpyrosis, the Watershed,” by Joe Hall

    Ekpyrosis, according to the Internet, is an Ancient Greek term that means “conflagration.” And, according to Google’s number one search result, Plato and the Christian Bible claimed the world would burn during a great apocalypse. It’s important to know this for Joe Hall’s poem, “Ekpyrosis, the Watershed” (from Oversound 9), because it’s not entirely clear…

  • “Let Us Mark This Day,” by Sarah Wolfson

    I remember in 2008, this poem by Linnea Ogden. “Contact.” Written like it was the poetry that lies beneath legal documentation. Like it was sounding out legalese, writing a poetic consideration of legal discourse. Maybe the “contact” of the title directs readers to think what happens when two kinds of language are put into contact…

  • from Townies, by Emiliano Gomez

    I feel like there are always questions someone should be asked after they’ve said they’re from somewhere. Something more than just, “Where’s that?” When I was in the Navy, people would ask where I was from, and I would say, “Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.” And they would always think I was saying something stupid, because where…

  • “Split the Lark,” by Angelo Mao

    There could be an argument that Angelo Mao’s poem, “Split the Lark,” is just a play on nothing. The openly ironic game where a poem toys with nothing. It pretends nothing is nothing, and when it shows that to be true, then it turns the poem to ask why are there all these ways to…

  • “Cenotaph: Salt Cedar and Shed,” by Richard Greenfield

    I’m not sure what I would identify as the event occasioning Richard Greenfield’s poem, “Cenotaph: Salt Cedar and Shed.” Working from the title, I would set it on the unusual equation of a salt cedar and a cenotaph. Like the poet looks out of his window and there’s a salt cedar that has grown past…

  • “Late Shift,” by Amy Woolard

    What I admire in Amy Woolard’s poem, “Late Shift” is the construction of lateness, especially as you’re looking back from a later moment in life, or feeling like you might have been too late to really appreciate the life you were experiencing at that time. Young adulthood is strange, because it’s easy to reflect on…

  • “Elliptical,” by Kristen Steenbeeke

    Do you remember when every interesting poem was labeled “elliptical,” because it did this thing with juxtaposition or parataxis or dysjunction, and the subject matter or the poem’s voice was just spaced differently. And that made it more interesting. And God bless Stephanie Burt for setting those poems away from the LangPo and Narrative “in-fighting”…