June 3, 2024
Evie Shockley Introduces Ariana Benson
Ariana Benson’s debut collection, Black Pastoral, has seeded my psyche with its lush and thorny language. The poems it contains taught me to read its title with the irony due […]
June 3, 2024
before the union rally
on the campus green, a loose cloud of onlookers collects around a bloody tableau :: hunter and kill, strange in this scene,where some students in spring can still afford to […]
June 3, 2024
Orange and Solstice
The Kenyon Review · “Desire” & “Orange and Solstice” by Tobi Kassim Not to grow, just to hold withering at bay. Paint my walls this shadow absorbing long nights. When […]
June 3, 2024
Desire
The Kenyon Review · “Desire” & “Orange and Solstice” by Tobi Kassim Out of nothing a breathing. The breakthrough leaf of a seedling. I can almost choose to be drenched,to […]
June 3, 2024
Matthew Olzmann Introduces Tobi Kassim
A “nature poem,” in the hands of Tobi Kassim, can arrive in a number of forms, be about a range of topics, and use a wide variety of approaches. Nature […]
June 3, 2024
Elephant
I have 40,000 muscles in my trunk and 396 in the rest of my body. I can remember a boneyard from three lamentations ago. I smell rain six countries away. […]
June 3, 2024
Epithalamium That Turns from the Garden
The problem with flowers in poetry is the petals are always ethereal and wispy, early buds of new attraction. Most have never endured the first frost of the Upper Midwest […]
June 3, 2024
The Planting
The Kenyon Review · “The Planting” by Charles Douthat In a dark time we planted a tree we planted a flowering crab apple tree during a hard time we […]
June 3, 2024
“Nature’s Nature” at Ten
In the May /June 2015 issue of the Kenyon Review appeared what I thought would be a one-time feature on poetry and the environment, “Nature’s Nature.” For several years I’d compiled […]
April 1, 2024
Three Works and a Series
April 1, 2024
Three Works
June 16, 2023
juxtaposition with winter
After Player come back come back / come back my shivering fingers say as i free them from their gloves / come back i whisper to my breath as it escapes / like a ghost into […]