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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“The New Abandon,” by Mark Anthony Cayanan
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…
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“CHORUS 9 / OJITO CANYON,” by Daniela Naomi Molnar
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…
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“Fever,” by Kim Hyesoon
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…