I take great pleasure in pursuing spectacular poems. And given how much poetry is being published at this point, this is not not an easy task. So much good work is being published! So aside from looking for work by the poets I admire, I look for editors with great taste. Or magazines and presses who consistently rely on editors with great taste.
These are some of the poems I’ve found that are spectacular! Or I think they are, at least.
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“Failure Matrix,” by Eric Tyler Benick
In John Ashbery’s “As You Came From the Holy Land,” I wrote about how daily life, as told by a poem, can be about the merest rhythms, can dwell on the most predictable boredoms. Some days, as Ashbery’s poem implies, are better spent forgetting time can pass uneventfully. And some days can be spent hoping…
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“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…
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“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…