Two forms of sacrifice We are all familiar with how sacrifice (or immolation, which I will use superfluously for the sheer sonic joy of it) works: someone or something is relinquished in exchange for another thing which is usually not beneficial to the immolated thing but of great value to those who turn it into…
Read MoreStratified replies #1
What follows is practice in formulating an aesthetic method for packaging my thinking process, which is informed by my current peripatetic reading. I tend to read something and consider how it might be the gambit for a potential essay. It is then dumped on a pile of other such ideas, because I don’t have time…
Read MoreReview of Stephanie L. Harper’s The Death’s Head’s Testament
The Death’s Head’s Testament continues on from Stephanie’s previous book This Being Done & fortunate for us Stephanie is in the present progressive, hammering out the dimensions of poems. The poems here continue to wade in the difficulties of womanhood, family, child-rearing, love, life, memory & death. There is wakeful invention, an intellectual alacrity, sure-footedness…
Read MoreThere’s no need to be a poet (time is forgotten)
This poem from the Yoon Yong series is probably a personal anxiety of my own showing through the tissue paper of personality. I think all poets (I cannot speak for translators) have some such concern as this in their transmogrification of reality & experience into the poetic. The solution: not apologizing for seeing, trying, relying &…
Read MoreFalun Gong (still rheum in her eyes)
Falun Gong (still rheum in her eyes) …As she is leaving The Comfort Inn she stops to watch a snippet from a KBS documentary : “They would drag us away for thorough medical examinations. Test our blood | take urine & stool samples| check our reflexes with a soft wooden mallet —our eye sight too.…
Read MoreSarah Law (Chapbook Confessions #2)
Originally posted on Underfoot Poetry:
Chapbook Confessions is a series in which poets discuss, at length, the writing of their most recent collection of poems, in whatever way they desire. For more information on the series, go here. Below, Sarah Law writes on her 2014 collection Ink’s Wish. Sarah Law lives in London, UK, and…
Criticisms of the West (11:44 a.m.)
Criticisms of the West (11:44 a.m.) …Does all this talk get recorded anywhere —a data-bank of the cosmos? My Western friends are always talking about the Universe’s Consciousness—Thai dye t-shirts & harem pants | mandalas patterning them —I stick out like a sore thumb in my grey pant suit. They travel through Asia for a…
Read MoreBone Antler Stone by Tim Miller, a review
I’m aware this “review” could potentially end up as flat out extolment for a poet who has become my friend and whose poems I was fortunate enough to have read in their early drafts. Am I biased? Probably. But I am going to make an effort to evidence what makes this a worthy read. There…
Read MoreHunger (8:39 a.m.)
Hunger (8:39 a.m.) …I remember clearly… lepers from Bible sermons made me tickle stomached —I never read the passages alone even when mother underlined them to be read before I slept | I could summarize them enough to get away without reading them again : nature never bites off more than it can chew. “The…
Read MoreHannah Rousselot (4 Poems)
Originally posted on Underfoot Poetry:
Hollow Glasses clink and mouths smile and jewelry sparkles and eyes are hungry hawks. This dress is too tight. My smile is too tight. My stomach is too tight. I wish I could peel off my skin to stretch it out over the curve of the Earth. Maybe I would…
Daniel Paul Marshall 