July 1, 2001
Summers of Translation
Desolation’s desert. I’m here with shadows of your voice … —Faiz Ahmed Faiz, “Memory“ 1. "Memory"—two years after your death they tell me—has no translations. We knew it in a loved version, […]
July 1, 2001
The Body on Fire, the Soul in Flight
The Complete Poems of Michelangelo translated by John Frederick Nims. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. 185 pp. $25 hardcover. The Poems of St. John of the Cross translated by […]
July 1, 2001
Out of the Cradle, Violently Rocking: The New Young Poets
The New Young American Poets. Edited by Kevin Prufer. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000. 264 pp. $16.95 paper, $49.95 cloth. The New American Poet. Edited by Michael Collier. […]
July 1, 2001
Glass Dress
Lily St. Cyr is dead. A de-luxe woman, stripper extraordinaire. Blond, like the cortex of a blazing sun finding the perfect grammar of its form in sublime asymmetry, gams and […]
July 1, 2001
Ramoan Parish Bulletin
On the yachted sea, your boats burned so beautifully, the last summer, as many of us then thought. I unheard like a voice on wheels your undersea eyes, your […]
July 1, 2001
They Must Be Poetry
A pigeon-colored dawn, and two generals march —are marched— between sandbags to a wooden post. Klimovsky notices the post is splintered. Soon […]
July 1, 2001
Tenderness
From the Polish. In the end tenderness what am I to do with you tenderness for stones birds and people you ought to sleep in the hand behind the eye […]
July 1, 2001
A Valley in the Shadow of North Hollywood
As if cued to the first peach prayer-call of sunrise, the scattered choir of radio alarm clocks summon the sleeping body from celestial time to a work-week morning in the […]
July 1, 2001
In a City
From the Polish. In an eastern city where I won't return there is a winged stone light and huge lightning strikes this winged stone I close my eyes to remember […]
July 1, 2001
Body Says
Body says, meet the animal who made you. Body says, I'll take mine with a little tornado sauce, please, and cunnilingus on the side. Body says break and […]
July 1, 2001
Four Women Poets From Contemporary China: Husk an Ear of Corn
That night was like all other nights corn swung gently at the back of the village I was waiting for my lover at the door He traversed one restroom and […]
July 1, 2001
Brief History of a Sentence
In the beginning, The universe, i.e., great outward rush of fires and nights, and at its edge, Among thickets of matter fraying, a star Devolving into helium and its sidekick, […]