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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“New Apartments,” by Jana Prikryl
As I describe in my goodreads review of Prikryl’s book, Midwood (Norton, 2022), the poems have this remarkably swift practice of establishing their primary concern, or their narrative setting. For instance, in her poem, “Field Trip,” she quickly positions the awkward and slightly alienating position a parent has on a field trip with her child,. How it…
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“Into the Mountains,” by April Goldman
What I really enjoyed about Goldman’s poem is how it positions the self among nature, and then thinks about the world from this perspective. What is it to be a self among nature? How is it someone would feel themselves as a self if they saw the world like that? Like a continually multiplying self-awareness…