April 1, 2003
From “Republic Sublime”
Winner, 2002 Kenyon Review Prize for Poetry Letter of Introduction to Gostan Zarian from Troia Morning and Lesbos slowly climbing out from fog—those thousand ships replaced by dozens of boats […]
January 1, 2002
Fat
I’m afraid things have gone to pot around here since you left. Cadbury has buried the remote control and I’ve let myself go. I know you think I should keep […]
January 1, 2002
Body Games
Shelley Jackson is a gifted writer, illustrator, performer, and electronic artist who, very playfully, very disturbingly, takes the body apart and puts it back together again, always in startlingly imaginative […]
July 1, 2001
Losing Mr. Daylater: A Note on Beth Ann Fennelly
Early on in Beth Ann Fennelly’s rowdy and stimulating “From L’Hôtel Terminus Notebooks,” the inner critic who appears in the poem as Mr. Daylater, a distant relative of the mocker […]
July 1, 2001
From “L’Hôtel Terminus Notebooks”
Prologue: Holding an Open House I sing of the millennium, the most misspelled word of the millennium. I sing of the four categories from which art is drawn: […]
April 1, 2000
Incarnational Verse
A first reading of Larissa Szporluk’s work always sends me back for more of its oblique seductions. Her poems withhold and disclose with equal intrigue, and their flickering gestures of […]
April 1, 2000
Homogeny
There are light and milk and worship on us all, which is why I don’t mind if she’s spotted. Hills are just plains that rose in disobedience, how long can […]
April 1, 2000
Faire Faire
It comes from eternity, from its depths, its planes, the little gift called time, and enters what is ours, to be our time. The lamb could see the panorama from […]
April 1, 2000
Eidola
Everything unreal is alike. A flying turtle, a flying wife. Whatever her needs were, unreal, alike, extremes that touch (the high, the low, the sickening and burgeoning of twilight), were […]
April 1, 2000
Amusia
The world is mortal. Its parts are mortal. The beach is in summer form. A girl I know is falling out of favor, like a toy, falling out of harmony, […]
April 1, 2000
Trapeze
To float you must float from within. You must not feel attached as you brush past the body you loved, an arm past an arm, an almost weightless vapor. Don’t […]
April 1, 2000
Leaving the Eccentric
The queenfish visits the spring every spring, and she does it alone, carried away from her silvery coast, the blue drum region, carried away by the aerial ocean above, the […]