All posts tagged: Poetry Feature

Portfolio from China: Poetry Feature I

This piece is part of a special portfolio featuring new and queer voices from China. Read more from the portfolio here.

By Li Zhuang, Cynthia Chen, Chen Du, Xisheng Chen, and Jolie Zhilei Zhou

Table of Contents:

  • Li Zhuang, “Fan Fiction”
  • Cynthia Chen, “When the TOEFL robot asked us to ‘Describe the city you live in,’ the whole room started repeating that question as if casting an aimless spell”
  • Yan An, translated by Chen Du and Xisheng Chen, “Photo of Free Life in the E-Era”
  • Jolie Zhilei Zhou, “Der Knall” 
Portfolio from China: Poetry Feature I
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Portfolio from China: Poetry Feature II

This piece is part of a special portfolio featuring new and queer voices from China. Read more from the portfolio here.

By WU WENYING, SU SHI, SHANGYANG FANG, YUN QIN WANG, and CAO COLLECTIVE

Translated poems appear in both the original Chinese and in English.

Table of Contents:

  • Wu Wenying, translated by Shangyang Fang, “Departure” & “Visiting Lingyan Mountain” 
  • Su Shi, translated by Shangyang Fang, “Return to Lin Gao at Night”
  • Yun Qin Wang, “The First Rain”
  • CAO Collective, “qiào bā”
Portfolio from China: Poetry Feature II
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September 2024 Poetry Feature

New Poems by Our Contributors MORRI CREECH, ELISA GABBERT, ANNA GIRGENTI, and GRANT KITTRELL.

 

Table of Contents:

  • Morri Creech, “The Others”
  • Elisa Gabbert, “A Hermitage”
  • Anna Girgenti, “The Goldfinch”
  • Grant Kittrell, “Losing It”

 

The Others
By Morri Creech

The children that I have never had follow me, late, through the vacant corridors.
They whisper there is still time, time for the quarter moon to nock its black arrow

September 2024 Poetry Feature
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August 2024 Poetry Feature: New Poems By Our Contributors

New Poems by Our Contributors NICOLE COOLEY, DUY ĐOÀN, and JOHN KINSELLA.

 

Table of Contents:

  • Nicole Cooley, “Covanta, A Detail”
  • Duy Đoàn, “Norepinephrine — “Suicides in Fiction Say Goodbye”
  • John Kinsella, “Before Eurydice Was Bitten”

 

Covanta, A Detail
By Nicole Cooley

The incinerator smoke an incision in the sky.
My daughter no longer small yet still I want to swallow her back into my body.
Sky a scalding.
My daughter asks me to stop saying, I wish this wasn’t the world you have to live in.
In my dream my girl is the size of a thumb I catch between my teeth.
Sky all smoke.
In the morning, men wearing masks drag our cans out to their truck.
In the morning, out the kitchen window, I wish the wide street rivered.

August 2024 Poetry Feature: New Poems By Our Contributors
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July 2024 Poetry Feature: Megan Pinto

By MEGAN PINTO

Excerpted from “even in silence”

 

My father is perseverating, moving around the edges of rooms. On repeat, he asks, but how will
we pay for it? How will we pay for it? 

He follows me, my mother, then me, then my mother. Inside my childhood home, there are only
so many rooms. 

On Christmas Day, I bake a loaf of frozen bread. I feed slices to my father with my hands, then
catch each chewed up bit he pushes back out with his tongue. 

He is speaking.
I am numb.

July 2024 Poetry Feature: Megan Pinto
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June 2024 Poetry Feature: New Poems by Our Contributors

New poems by our contributors DAN ALBERGOTTI, KATE GASKIN, IQRA KHAN, and CARSON WOLFE 

Table of Contents: 

  • Dan Albergotti, “The Dumb Show” 
  • Kate Gaskin, “Newest Baby” 
  • Iqra Khan, “I Seek Refuge” 
  • Carson Wolfe, “Jack Kerouac Begs Me to Get an Abortion” 

 

The Dumb Show 
By Dan Albergotti 

They showed you the models. They warned you well
in advance. Levels and gasses and ice melt and us.
Storms and floods and fires and famine and us.
And now it’s here. And now you act surprised.

When I was studying Hamlet in college,
I wondered how Claudius could be so taken aback 
by the inner play’s events when the silent pantomime 
of the dumb show had already given away the plot.

My professor explained that the royals
would usually ignore the dumb show, would shield
their eyes, thinking such explanatory preamble
to the play itself was far beneath their station.

The dumb show was for the average folk, he said.
In the end, both Rosencrantz and Claudius are dead.

June 2024 Poetry Feature: New Poems by Our Contributors
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May 2024 Poetry Feature: Pissed-Off Ars Poetica Sonnet Crown

By REBECCA FOUST

    1. (Written after the workshop)

Fuck you, if I want to put a bomb in my poem
I’ll put a bomb there, & in the first line.
Granted, I might want a nice reverse neutron bomb
that kills only buildings while sparing our genome
but—unglue the whole status-quo thing,
the canon can-or-can’t do?  Fuck yeah, & by
“canon” I mean any rule, whether welded
by time, privilege, or empire, & also by
the newer memes. Anyway, I want the omelet
because of the broken eggs. I want to break glass
into dust, to spindrift it into new form. I want
to melt mortar down into quicklime that burns.
Less piety, please. Any real response to my poem
will do—laugh, cry, yawn—or STFU & go home.

May 2024 Poetry Feature: Pissed-Off Ars Poetica Sonnet Crown
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April 2024 Poetry Feature: New Metamorphoses

By ALAN BAER, CARLIE HOFFMAN, CAMPBELL MCGRATH, and FARAH PETERSON.

Table of Contents:

  • Campbell McGrath, “Hendrixiana”
  • Carlie Hoffman, “A Condo for Sale Overlooking the Cemetery in Kearny, NJ” and “Reading Virginia Woolf in a Women in Literature Class at Bergen County Community College”
  • Farah Peterson, “Daedalus in Exile” and “Pasiphaë’s Grief”
  • Alan Baer, “Orpheus”

 

April 2024 Poetry Feature: New Metamorphoses
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New Poems from YOU ARE HERE, edited by Ada Limón

By ADAM CLAY, KHADIJAH QUEEN, ROGER REEVES, ANALICIA SOTELO, and RIGOBERTO GONZÁLEZ

To kick off Poetry Month we’re bringing you selections from Poet Laureate Ada Limón’s new anthology, You Are Here, out this month from Milkweed Editions.

As part of her signature project, “You Are Here,” 24th US Poet Laureate Ada Limón has commissioned fifty-two contemporary American poets to observe and reflect on their place in the natural world. The resulting anthology of original poems is a timely portrait of the myriad ways the natural world speaks to us and reflects us. Some of the poems included here contend with the destruction of nature, while others consider its abundance and resilience—and some do both at the same time. While these poems emerge from deeply personal perspectives, together they reveal that nature, like poetry, is universal—and that our interpretations of the natural world are grounded in the nature of our humanity. They also serve as a call for readers to take in the nature all around them, wherever they are. 

(from the Foreword to You Are Here, by Carla Hayden, Librarian of Congress)

New Poems from YOU ARE HERE, edited by Ada Limón
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