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 Thrush,” by Pergentino José
What are the gods for a thrush? And what might happen to a thrush that it would renounce whoever these gods are? And is it all five gods? All twenty of them? And was it them being negligent or careless that opened the silence where the thrush could discover “small gems of truth”? All of…
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“in the chemo room, I wear mittens made of ice so I don’t lose my fingernails. But I took a risk today to write this down,” by Andrea Gibson
Andrea Gibson’s poem, “in the chemo room, I wear mittens made of ice…”, runs a countercurrent between hope and skepticism, like if the phrase “realistically speaking” could be inflated, so it wasn’t only registering the skepticism about any moment in life but also what life feels like when you’re really looking at the reality with…
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“Not on Geological Time,” by Felicia Zamora
Imagine a human body that was mimicking or participating or sympathetic to geological time. The all-time of earth. A human of the earth, born on earth, with biological processes that must be cognizant of earth. Not special among the earth. But special because the earth is present inside her. While she’s looking at a lake.…