Category Archives: Poetry

May Swenson has a line somewhere about “unconceived / fluidities and agitations” which put me in mind of Mary di Michele’s Mimosa and other poems where slight but significant variations take place under the sign of water which is fitting … Continue reading →

It is like a dream journal meets a glossary complete with cross-references and see also suggestions. After you, dearest language. Marisol Limon Martinez. (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2005) Let’s take a trip, shall we? AMERICA: BANDE A PART A little group … Continue reading →

Nicole Brossard has always been a writer … with the erotics of the advent of language and articulations. No less a theme in … “Museum of Bone and Water” in the collection of the same name translated by Robert Majzels … Continue reading →

I have no idea why these lines remind me of the title of the Truffaut film Le Dernier Métro. There is nothing so homesick-making as the ecstasy of a fellow transient. Perhaps it is a hint of locale – Paris … Continue reading →

These lines on Elizabeth Bishop by poet May Swenson refer no doubt to Bishop’s alcoholism. The poem was never published in Swenson’s lifetime. It appears in the Utah State University Press 2000 publication of Dear Elizabeth: Five Poems & Three … Continue reading →

For the sheer gorgeousness of the title (which are also the concluding lines of a poem), Tell Me Again How the White Heron Rises and Flies Across the Nacreous River at Twilight Towards the Distant Islands … but also for … Continue reading →

Blest in its cussedness. there’s a woman who tires of picking up after her lover so she nails his underwear to the floor From Barbara Carey “Routines Are Your Life” in The Ground of Events. This might be remembered as … Continue reading →

Michael V. Smith has a suite of poems in What You Can’t Have that is based on black and white photographs by William Gale Gedney of “dirt-poor families in 1960’s Kentucky”. Smith has a sharp and keen appreciation of plot … Continue reading →