Category: Spectacular Poems

I came across this poem in Missouri Review’s Poem of the Week from the beginning of this month. And I have to say my first reaction is water, what the feelings around postpartum might mean to water, a human body immersed in water or consisting of water, relating to water in a meaningful way, especially…

Reading through the latest issue of FENCE, Dally’s poem stands out. I like repetition, and how various a repetition-note can play out in a poem. This issue featured five of Dally’s poems, and in the others, his repetition serves as a kind of shift, where the poem moves from one frame of thinking to the…

I’ve always been fascinated by the story of Moses putting a hot coal to his lips, because Moses deserves a more complicated story. I grew up hearing about a “Moses” who wasn’t supposed to be complicated in that hey-he-murdered-someone, oh-and-he-maimed-himself kind of way. He was supposed to be a hero. A spiritual leader. And every…

While I try as much as I can to approach each book with an open reading, I also know there there are certain methods that consistently draws me into poems. The one in Daniela Naomi Molnar’s book, CHORUS, is familiar to me, but I’m not sure what to call it. “Breathless”? “Relentless”? “Insisitent”? It’s like…

In the goodreads review I just posted about Hyesoon’s book, Poor Love Machine, I named a “humidity” to the surrealism. And, as I said there, “humidity” might not have been the best term, because it often indicates a heavy weight made heavier the longer someone stands in a humid environment. I do think, however, that…

Full disclosure, I am beholden to Cody-Rose Clevidence. Like when you hear a baby go “Gaga,” and you hear the grown-up close by say, “Gaga” back. I’m both those voices. I’m a recording of those voices you look at on your phone the year after they were saying “Gaga” to each other. Is this a…

I just finished writing a goodreads.com review for Bennett’s second book, Owed, and I wanted to call some attention to the book’s last poem, “America Will Be.” I have always been fascinated by the political poem. Not least because during the mid-2000s there were so many conversations about bringing politics into poetry. And those conversations felt especially awkward…

What is an “inarticulable feeling”? Like the one in Colleen Louise Barry’s poem “Pilsen.” Is it possible to relate this feeling to beauty? Which Barry seems interested in doing. Or maybe she doesn’t. Or maybe she’s going to propose a more smudgy relationship between beauty and this feeling. I guess partly because beauty is often…

I had just come across this poem, “origin story,” by Ginny Threefoot this morning. Which in itself is a spectacular poem. And I’m going to try and make space for posting about it. But it reminded me of this poem I read by Nora Hikari back in the fall. “The Book of Eve” (from The…

I know Alice Notley isn’t the only person to write about the relationship between “line” and “sentence,” but I have always appreciated the illustrations she uses in her essay, “American Poetic Music at the Present Moment.” (found in Coming After (University of Michigan Press, 2005)) For a long time, I don’t think I was a…