The Other

Long-time resident of Miami poet Michael Hettich has been writing and publishing poetry for over three decades now. His friends and students here in South Florida have luckily benefitted from the closeness and dialy-ness of his presence and work, so too have many of his long-time readers here and abroad. As the three poems to [...]

FOR LACK OF DIAMOND YEARS BY CAROLINE BEASLEY-BAKER ISBN 978-1938349096 NOVEMBER 2013 PELEKINESIS As a literary person who became an art critic, the nexus of visual art and poetry has always been of interest to me. I have known Caroline Beasley-Baker as a painter; now I know her also as a poet. In Beasley-Baker’s visual [...]

There’ll Be Heartache He pulled onto the shoulder, air breaks huffing, stopped and rolled the window down—outside the air was dry but cold, early-autumn evening closing in, and I was eighty miles outside El Paso with a pack across my back heading west, because a friend had died and nothing seemed to fit, the days [...]

DEATH CENTOS BY DIANA ARTERIAN UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE 2014 Diana Arterian’s chapbook Death Centos is currently available in a limited edition set ($125) that includes two additional works of art. The first of these is a broadside, designed as a version of the Goose Game, with an inward-spiraling design that depicts a life cycle. The [...]

Transcendent Beauty in Yeats and Keats The works of W. B. Yeats and John Keats are interestingly similar in style and concept. Both rely heavily on imagery. Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium” is full of sensory imagery describing the journey to an ideal place, just as Keats’ “Ode to a Grecian Urn” is beautifully portraying the [...]

Revealing the presence of order in “The Idea of Order at Key West” “The Idea of Order at Key West” was written by Wallace Stevens, a ‘transcendentalist’ in the modernism era. Steven’s poetry reflected works similar to those of Whitman and Wordsworth in that he loved writing on concepts of the natural world to help [...]

I first encountered Mark Leidner’s poems on in 2007. Those early poems struck me for how they treated absurd corners of cultural ephemera with the utmost seriousness, and in a vernacular language that seamlessly ascended to momentary heights of poetic beauty. And Leidner read them in an incredibly patient and affectless voice. The overall effect: [...]