Anna Journey is the author of the poetry collections Vulgar Remedies (Louisiana State University Press, 2013) and If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting (University of Georgia Press, 2009), which was selected by Thomas Lux for the National Poetry Series. She is an assistant professor of English at the University of Southern California. Her website is http://annajourney.com.
Nature’s Nature
Mar/Apr 2021
Lullaby Interrupted by the Stump of the Mammoth Tree
This is as close as I can get to a lullaby. It’s July — four months into the virus, and sleeping through the early morning exists only as a memory, a relic […]
Nature’s Nature
Mar/Apr 2021
The Judas Ear
I invited the apostle to my stir-fry dinner by accident. I shook into my smoking wok a packet of dried wood ear mushrooms — the ones I’d bought from a farmers’ market. […]
Poetry
Summer 2010
Warning
As heat moves through like its own animal whose evening pulse is headlights and a reply of lit cats’ eyes, as after the amber of Freon streaks my ceiling and […]
Poetry
Summer 2010
Sonnets to Ambien
1 A reaper and his phosphorescent lynx hover from my coat hook. I’m already this far from sleep. Whole species away. The pillow swims. Isn’t this hot flutter in each […]
Poetry
Fall 2008
Adorable Siren, Do You Love the Damned?
— Baudelaire The devil pries open my red hibiscus, like skirts. On the crack corner those transvestite hookers won't quit competing with my garden's barbed and carnal tongues. The bitch […]
Fall 2014
The Queer Baroque: On Saeed Jones’s Prelude to Bruise
“In Birmingham, said the burly man—//,” writes Saeed Jones, “Boy, be / a bootblack. // Your back, blue-back. / Your body, burning.”
Fall 2014
The Great Past Tense: On Sean Bishop’s The Night We’re Not Sleeping In
“Dear fat sagacious angels in the cumular eaves,” Sean Bishop writes in “A Bit of Forgiveness,” “why is it / that today, eating pork chops of all things, I’m thinking / of the time I stabbed Phil Kimble with an oak branch I whittled, / for no good reason?”
Summer 2014
The River’s Asylum: Joshua Poteat’s Steampunk Pastoral
“In the asylum’s cadaver room, // a janitor holds his lantern in wonder / over a bucket of breasts cut from the winter’s dead,” Joshua Poteat writes in the title poem to The Scenery of Farewell (and Hello Again), one of his two recently published chapbooks.
Spring 2014
Burlesquing the Midwestern Gothic: On Mary Biddinger’s O Holy Insurgency
“Start // with unyielding cruise control,” writes Mary Biddinger in her poem “Gem of the North,” “two / blueberry donuts without filling. // Do not drink water from the taps.”
Winter 2014
Gleaned from a Vacancy: On Victoria Chang’s The Boss
“[O]ne year / my father lost his words to a stroke / a stroke of bad luck stuck his words / used to be so worldly his words fired // him let him go without notice can they do that,” writes Victoria Chang in The Boss.
Fall 2013
What Is Left but Obsession: On Allison Benis White’s Small Porcelain Head
“What is left but obsession, handling the object over and over?” writes Allison Benis White in one of her untitled prose poems from her second collection, Small Porcelain Head, selected by Claudia Rankine for the Four Way Books Levis Prize in Poetry.
Fall 2013
Alchemic Kitchens: On Hannah Gamble’s Your Invitation to a Modest Breakfast
“The gypsy plays best when the ashes from his first wife’s clothes blow into creaking folds of his accordion,” writes Hannah Gamble in her poem “I Am Told a Told a Thing or Two about the Duende.”
Summer 2013
Bring Out Memory’s Erotica: On Beckian Fritz Goldberg’s Egypt from Space
“Let’s not bring out memory’s erotica,” writes Beckian Fritz Goldberg, “the negligées whose silk thrills it like ice dropped right where, right where. I don’t have to say.”
Spring 2013
Three Poems
Last Nostalgia Starting with a Piece of Spider Plant on our Car’s Backseat
You moved clippings of your childhood spider plant
with us in a Ziploc half-filled with tap water
Winter 2013
Watermark and Fable: On Eduardo C. Corral’s Slow Lightning
“I’m / performing / an autopsy on my shadow,” writes Eduardo C. Corral in “Self-Portrait with Tumbling and Lasso.” Elliptically narrative, imagistic, musical, and fabular, the poems in Corral’s debut poetry collection, Slow Lightning, explore the shadowy borderlands of both gay and Chicano identity while adapting and altering aspects of magical realism.
Fall 2012
A Conversation with Anna Journey: Q & A with Davis McCombs’s Graduate Poetry Course
This collaborative interview with the poet Anna Journey took place during the seminar, “Contemporary First Books of Poetry,” a graduate course for students in the MFA program at the University […]
Summer 2012
If the Past Is a Ghost Town: On Catherine Pierce’s The Girls of Peculiar
The “girls of peculiar” in Catherine Pierce’s eponymous second collection of poems hail from a variety of strange and mythic places: the spooky recesses of personal history (a recurring purple-haired high school self), the cliques of adolescence