Ben Purkert‘s poems appear in AGNI, Boston Review, Fence, Kenyon Review, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. He is also the founder of CityShelf, an easy way to source books locally and support indie bookstores. More information at benpurkert.com.
Poetry
Mar/Apr 2019
I Know a Place Far from Here
there’s an ocean taking the razor shells and dropping them from the sky no it is the birds! the birds! broken pieces of them everywhere
Poetry
Fall 2014
Remaining on Point
To the ground, a tree is tangential. The sky’s always on the fence. Honey, I can’t decide when, where, or how. All I know is please remove your heels before […]
Spring 2015
Elegy Meets Selfie: Contextualizing Sina Queyras’s
M x T
Elegy is, among other things, a form of gift-giving: the mourner bestows praise on the departed through the humble offering of a poem.
Spring 2014
Music In Motion: If One Of Us Should Fall
Forget aspiring to the condition of music—Nicole Terez Dutton’s poetry achieves it. Winner of the 2011 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, If One Of Us Should Fall accompanies a touring musician across a “sprawl of club dates from coast to coast, [a] series of sad motels in pastel disrepair.”
Summer 2013
Spiraling to the Point: Sally Keith’s The Fact of the Matter
The phrase “the fact of the matter” implies instant distillation. Sally Keith’s poems are more discursive than that but no less concentrated in their intent.
Winter 2013
Strength, Sweetness, and More: The Available World by Ander Monson
True to its name, The Available World is vast in scope. To enter this compendium is to lunge into “all our collected layers”: a space littered with dropped candied hearts, disposable cameras, and “bodies / sprawled out like petals at a wedding.”