Volume 113, Number 1/2
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We talked between the rooms Until the moss had reached our lips. —Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) FRONT COVER: Old abandoned room. Photography by Brian Mundy. |
Editors’ Page
Like a dream—or a poem—the image on our cover unsettles the distinction between inside and out. The framework of an interior space (doorways, shutters, walls) is called into question by surrealist intrusions: a rowboat in shallows, clouds roiling overhead. What’s a room without a ceiling or a solid floor?
In the pages that follow, you’ll find work that subverts expectations in much the same way—blurring boundaries between memory and perception, the self and the world. Shannon Spies, whose first published poem appears in this issue, turns feeling inside out, marking love’s failure with a stick-figure sketch; Barbara Crooker steps from a storefront in a Hopper painting out onto the streets of her own childhood; Andrew Hemmert passes collapsed carnival rides stalled along a highway and finds himself revisiting a long-ago fair; Jay Leeming travels from magical realism to the familiar magic of a maternity ward in his long meditation on birth and naming. Tacking from realm to realm seems as natural to these poets as shaping lines into stanzas.
Also in this issue, Tony Hoagland explores the evolving achievement of poet Henri Cole, and Sandra M. Gilbert offers an intimate review of Chana Bloch’s last book. In keeping with Poet Lore’s historical interest in world literature, our World Poets in Translation portfolio showcases the late Ilja Kostovski, whose provocative tirades cross cultures and dictions. Born to Macedonian Slavs in northern Greece, educated in Czechoslovakia, and for years a professor here in the US, he embraced the Old World and the New—belonging wholly to neither and strangely to both.
Where does inside end and outside start? In “Reading Basho,” Billy Reynolds conjures a domestic tableau, as a father and daughter speak at twilight in their yard. Maybe shelter’s less a matter of what we keep out than of what we keep close:
We stretch our legs and let the moon in with our small talk.
There is nothing between us but frogs croaking.
Here is our fireplace. Here is our large room.
Content
Poetry
Charles Grosel The Threads of Happiness
Jana-Lee Germaine Daughter
Brian Simoneau Lines Written in Early Spring
Donna Vorreyer Variations on Leaving
Corinna McClanahan Schroeder A Brief History of the Train
Meredith Hamilton Last Night
William Doreski Angles / Angels
Doug Ramspeck Empire of Mud
Shannon Spies Incommunicado
Carrie Addington Previous Theories of the Heart
Carrie Addington Waist Training
Erin Robertson The War to End Nothing
Taylor Collier Marital Art
Carrie Shipers hat are days for?
Carrie Shipers Death Is Not an Emergency
Laura Van Prooyen Postcard from Texas
Laura Van Prooyen She Inherits His Steady Hand
Kirsten Porter Disappearing
Aaron Caycedo-Kimura Detainment
Mark Belair Caught in Breezes
Andrew Hemmert Boxcars
Andrew Hemmert Carnival Rides
Michael Montlack My Father’s Workshop
Young Smith The White Truck
Chip Livingston The Magicians’ Twins
Robert Fillman A Creation Story
Samn Stockwell The Fifth Winter of My Grandmother
Gavin Gao Skein Song
BD Feil Boy and a Button
Billy Reynolds Reading Basho
Julie Danho The Night Before Kindergarten
Anna Leahy Blue Shift
Kathy Engel Since we’re talking about love
Anastasia Stelse The Radium Girls
Allen Stein Late-Night Radio
Richard Jones Attics
Richard Jones Wild Night Sonnet
Richard Jones Freud’s Glasses
Robert Eastwood Berggasse 19, Vienna
Barbara Crooker Drug Store, 1927
Peggy R. Ellsberg The Five and Ten
Gavin Gao
To the man on the bus who told me
to go back to where I came from
Ed Ochester
Ways in Which Donald J. Trump
Is Not Like Benito Mussolini
Ed Ochester “Big Jew”
Michael Marberry The Movietone
Judith Barrington Blame the Moon
Gregory Orfalea Poem for the Unspeakable
Kelly Michels Photograph of My Mother
Kelly Michels Elegy
Kerry James Evans Coal
Gary Fincke The House Paradise
Gary Fincke Four Tractors
Sonja James Semiology in Appalachia
Kurt Olsson Saved
Rod Jellema The Sensation of Tasting Scotch
Sara Burnett Throw Roses at Me
Sara Burnett American Robin
Jay Leeming Mother Night
Ben Jasnow Incantation
World Poets in Translation
Ilja Kostovski (Macedonia)
Introduction by Roman Kostovski
Talks with God
Sermon at the Washington Monument
Essay
Tony Hoagland, “Beyond Claustrophobia: The Poems of Henri Cole”
Reviews
Sandra M. Gilbert, “Looking at the Sun When the Moon is Almost Full”
The Moon Is Almost Full by Chana Bloch
Lee Rossi , “Left Coast Experiments: Recent Books from Omnidawn”
Güera
by Rebecca Gaydos
the field
by Robert Andrew Perez
Our Animal
by Meredith Stricker
Debra Wierenga, “Getting the News from Poems”
Mortal Trash
by Kim Addonizio
Where Now: New and Selected Poems
by Laura Kasischke
System of Ghosts
by Lindsay Tigue
Recent & Forthcoming Books by Poet Lore poets
Contributors