July 30, 2017
Dear Future People
how angels would walk the ocean if they wanted to walk. They don’t. They hover. —”Water at Night,” Marianne Boruch —or did you get past us, just far […]
July 21, 2017
Love in the Time of Disconnect(ing)
You might get out through all the waves and rocks Into the middle of the poem to touch them But when you’ve tried the blessed water long Enough to […]
July 18, 2017
Dispatches from the Literary Life
Because it’s summer and it’s slow, and maybe because it just rained here for three days straight and all I want to do right now is go back to reading Made […]
July 10, 2017
On the Steps of a Midnight Church: for Jasminne Mendez
Dear Jasminne, I’ve been thinking of you since you returned from your trip to the Dominican Republic, and about silence and poetry and the act of writing, and about what […]
June 30, 2017
Summer in the City (Part 2)
Last week, I shared a lighter memory of Summer in the City here on the blog. I write this now on a windy yet steaming hot night in which […]
June 24, 2017
Summer in the City (Part 1)
It’s the first real day of summer—which is rarely the first official day of summer but rather a time in which the schedules of you and seven other people magically […]
June 18, 2017
A Letter to My Father on Father’s Day
—and there was a young ram who’d climb to the top of the mountain with the rest of his family, and they were wild and belonged to no one […]
April 27, 2017
And The Moon Is the only Kindness We See
Dear Diane, Every time it rains, I think of you biking across Queens, and I pray you’ve already made it to work at Rikers. Often you arrive only to find […]
April 12, 2017
Honoring Our Editors
At my last CantoMundo retreat in the summer of 2015, I wrote a poem called “Matarose Tags G-Dragon on the 7” which freed, rather than mourned, the many complexities and […]
April 4, 2017
Poetry In Public III: Deborah Bernhardt and Repetition
In the notes on “Genesis I” in Jerome Rothenberg’s Technicians of the Sacred, he writes: What’s of interest here isn’t the matter of the myth but the power of repetition & […]
April 1, 2017
On April Fools Day The Giraffes Are in Charge & They Are Poets
“Wouldn’t it be unique to have a calf that day?” —Zookeeper Jordan Patch on April the Giraffe Today, this very first day of April, the giraffes are in charge, and […]