June 3, 2024
Phillip B. Williams Introduces Jasmine Reid
In Jasmine Reid’s poems, I find nature’s innate life transcribed as idiolect for the speaker’s body, desire, and acts of relating to another (betrothed, lover, the erotic self). Whatever each […]
June 3, 2024
Pastoral, Not Withstanding
The poplar knows the edge of voice and permits hidingin its shade. The magnolia holds what is holy closeto its darkness. The boughs no more a fear-tracedremembrance (Oh the fire […]
June 3, 2024
The Lengthening and Shortening of Shadow
I.Formidable, the lightdawn breaks across the fieldof our vision is stationary.We revolve around our own potentialseeing. The tree knows nothing more is needed but stillness and rise,rootwork and praiseas boughs […]
June 3, 2024
Aide-Mémoire
Bones sing to water the crowded graves. All elegies the elegy before: break and cycle. Elegies water the graves and crowded bones. Break the crowded bones and the graves sing. […]
June 3, 2024
Holding the Line
Through the winter I walked from the stone house to the river,knowing only some of the purplish berries’ names . . . must be beautyberry, I’d note while treading down […]
June 3, 2024
Mary Szybist Introduces Alicia Wright
In her essay “On Writing About Dorothy Wordsworth’s The Grasmere Journal,” Alicia Wright wonders: What if, yes, we can source a kind of ecocritical origin in The Grasmere Journal, distinct […]
June 3, 2024
I was wrestling with the lilac
reaching up to bend down its branches so I could clip them—the bush fartaller than me, still fragrant, leaveshalf-dead, never uglier, I washalf-inside it—*At the sound of himmaking the sound […]
June 3, 2024
Encounter
Not cotton, but the snowthat resembled it piling upin balled fists on the deadbranches. Not the music —worldly, natural — the sound-track itself, but the wayit melted everything around it down to its […]
June 3, 2024
Pastoral in the Mode of Bob Ross
Like God, we begin with the heavens. Dip our brush in the lightest colors, let the darker hues run down toward our blanched canvas ground. A simple scene: alizarin crimson, […]
June 3, 2024
on loveliness
i read somewhere that a group of ladybugs is called a loveliness. and i wonderwhat the person who gave themthat name (surely someone of at least measurable humanity) knew,or thought […]
June 3, 2024
Meditation on the Nature of Sound and Its Absence
Every day, dogs bark at me in my building’s garage. Dogs bark at each other. At seemingly nothing at all. I wonder how they must sound to themselves. In my […]