I could go on forever in this labyrinth of wood pulp, plucking beeswax stalks off sconces, pulling & prodding at appendages of statues that appear to flinch. …
Margaret Renkl. Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss. Minneapolis, Minn.: Milkweed Editions, 2019. 248 pages. Hardcover. $24.00. Late Migrations arrived on a busy afternoon, and I took a moment to flip through it, so inviting was the artwork, the dust cover, the heft of the nice paper…
You keep your failures close, intimate as unwashed sheets—that colleague’s novel left untouched in its box, a dead friend’s corpus of poems that will not see print, an ex-husband who can’t be shaken loose, a lover who comes close but not closer. Here is your photo gallery: mountain landscapes emptied…
Old men sing themselves to sunstroke in idling vans, their grown children inside buying out of season vegetables. We treat our youth like succulents on blistered windowsills, the memory of sustenance enough for us. We keep flattening the dust, the way a highway grinds the shade to pulp, a longitude…
Marc Harshman. Woman in Red Anorak. Amherst, Mass. and Seattle, Wa.: Lynx House Press/University of Washington Press, 2018. 70 pages. Sofcover. $17.95. In Woman in Red Anorak, Marc Harshman’s third full-length poetry collection, the poems span over disparate times and places, from a post-apocalyptic America to the Allied invasion of…
I have just enough of instinct left to know these signs of rain: an insect too routine for memory flits sideways; a squirrel reports his body’s arc into the greasy breeze between a low stone wall and a shade tree. The dish-pale sink of sky sucks out a lottery of…
Iris The calico’s eyes bloom blue-yellow in the window sill, alchemical gold. Sunflower Towering over wired archways, these guardians of hoop houses offer their bodies for butter, oil, lotion, birdfeed, or biodiesel. Poppy Armistice & remembrance, women who caught whiffs of independence in a San Franciscan back alley way. Morning…
After Ken Burns’s Country Music, episode one What if the world wasn’t spoken into existence but sung, chanted, passed down? Chicken one day, feathers the next. It must have been obnoxious, all that yodeling at the end of every sentence while Experience coated the ground. There was a time when…
I try and exit quick the body my lips move like moths at the center of the apple from the center of the orchard a blue diamond reflects my startled grin …
What is buried in the ground isn’t always what you think. It’s just the beginning.” With these evocative, mysterious words, Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle begins to draw the reader into the world of Cowney, a nineteen-year-old Cherokee man who serves as the protagonist in her debut novel Even As We Breathe.…