EXCERPT FROM EMERE’S TOBACCONIST (FROM DIATOMHERO: RELIGIOUS POEMS) Nothing is to be preferred before justice. -Socrates There are roach motels Set out around almost every portal to heaven. Watch for them, but do not beware, my love For when the sweet die The adhesive turns to honey on their feet. I There was one point When I had rolled over slightly to the left When I thought I felt a slight peace. I just seemed to bleed out faster that way . Once someone bent down and lapped a stream from my ear- A childhood friend of mine Twenty years ago in rural Ohio, Long since spread out into middle age, Across a landscape fate would sow for her. I wanted to reassure her, Rachel, you’ll live. I was already halfway in paradise, Waiting out my death. The destruction to my body was like a pedicure. As I flipped through [...]

Hughes’s ideas about jazz and blues were echoed by other black intellectuals only a few years after “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” was published. In Duke Ellington’s 1931 essay “The Duke Steps Out,” he says that jazz is more than the American idiom, but rather an essential part of black history, the result of transplantation to American soil and the evolution of the slave song, thus jazz has a history much deeper than mere dance music. “It expresses our personality, and, right down in us, our souls react to its elemental but eternal rhythm,” Ellington states (qtd. in Halliday 147). Like Hughes, Ellington makes a fine defense of jazz as an essential part of black culture, a music form that stems from slave plantation songs, a music that does not lead to laziness, nervousness, or hysteria, but rather a music that was necessary to survive in a white-dominated [...]

This is essay is divided into three parts. Part two will post on Wednesday, and part three on Friday. While many critics have noted the influence of blues and jazz on Langston Hughes’s poetry, little has been written about Hughes from a sound studies standpoint. His sonic landscapes not only chronicle Harlem from the 1920s to 1950s, but also challenge the sonic color-line, specifically ideas from the Enlightenment Period about sound and logic, ideas that still persisted in the first half of the 20th Century, evident through early criticism of ragtime and jazz. In defending black music forms and using specific sounds in his work, including blues, jazz, and laughter, sounds of interwar and post-war Harlem, Hughes challenges 19th Century notions that only white speech is clear and reasoned and sounds unable to be pinned down, particularly sounds of the racialized Other, are purely emotional and non-logical; Hughes’s sonic landscapes [...]

WHALE OF DESIRE BY MICAH TOWERY REDUX CONSORTIUM, 2013 ISBN 978-0991152315 In the interest of full disclosure, you should know that I’ve worked and corresponded with Micah Towery as a contributor to thethepoetry.com. It’s a cozy website that’s been kind enough to publish my rambling reviews, though I’ve only spoken with Micah through email or gchat. This wasn’t enough to preempt my reading of his debut collection Whale of Desire, and, since I am a poor follower of journals, I hadn’t come across any of his poetic work before this. That said, I tore through this book, finishing it within a couple of hours despite the many re-readings and moments of reflection. Debuts are often meticulously crafted over a long time, but Towery’s is more than the best of a life lived until publication. It’s elegant, sharp, and balanced, a slim volume with no fear and no agenda. And in [...]

PEACE BY GILLIAN CONOLEY OMNIDAWN, 2014 978-1890650957 Gillian Conoley’s new book of poetry (Omnidawn, 2014) is appropriately entitled Peace because it seems to aim at a kind of reconciliation: with the self, with family, with lovers, with the digital world, and with larger abstractions such as death and the occasional “God” or Christ which she infrequently refers to—but which seems to harbor in the vast undercurrents of the text. Her book is contingent upon a very austere subjectivism, but not without a very oblique, if not unintentional sense of humor. The subjectivism threads through the trajectory of the book in a very meaningful way, and yet the manner in which the subject relates herself to the situations she narrates seems as if through an opaque lens. And the opacity that prevails in its surrealistic bent could make the reader feel like he or she is sleepwalking through a very interesting [...]

LAMENT After Jacques-Louis David’s Oath of the Horatii There was a time when giants ruled the earth and women were gods, too. But here in this moment of mortality who, woman, will hold back your heart from the imminent cliffs of grief? You cry out instead of speaking, and if you were allowed you’d take the oath and follow your husband, guard him against the wretched spell of death like a shadow of black silk unraveling, like a permanent shadow forged onto the ground after an atomic blast, your arms outstretched; in the background a curtain surrenders in the wind. Beloved woman, twisted with torment your spinning head cries like a god out of control: Be brief! Let the weight of your serrated edges cut this sorrow out of me. _____________________________________________________________________ Ruben Quesada is the author of Next Extinct Mammal (2011) and Luis Cernuda: Exiled from the Throne of Night [...]

Body, Out (From Voicemail Poems) There is a freshly-made bed next to mine, that I don’t touch. There is a hum in the room, a hymn in the sky. That evening two animal gods stood mountaintop, and I sat below in the sunset, my body rooted, theirs extended, all precision and color; hoof on mountaintop, bone and rock, fur and mane; curve and wish, the desert is nothing but curve and wish, the shhhh of air, the hush of morning, of waking, of speaking to a silent room, to an unbearable angel, to a movement not unlike birth, legs open, body out A Sad, Private Place (From The Way Home) This is how I imagine it would go if I did not prick my finger, if I did not stop growing while asleep; if it did not matter that, in these years, you lived and grew beautifully, independently. This is [...]

EPITHALAMION FOR OUTLAWS: ACE HIPORST for Sara Nicholson & C. Violet Eaton THE STORY X & B buy ug gun. X & B full n luv. ACE WATCHES THE DAY THEY MEET X yullz, Buy um muddy muddy mulx-n-juzz fuv yud mum—mummy luv, B’z mummy luv luv luv muddy muddy mulx-n-juzz. bud nug gun—nuw gunz fuddu luk fug gud luk—luky luky mulx-n-juzz—zummy bulby bums wud nud wun buk bud bugz uf muddy-muddy mulx-n-juzz. Fuxy vuyz yu gud. Fuk my vuyz yu zummy kud. Juz mud ud dum nd buy mu zum nuw guns. ACE WARNS X: B IS TROUBLE X buzzd, Buddy flubbd. muddy muddy mulx-n-juzz! wud Buddy buy my guwn? U n flux. flux-fluxed bu dubbd—wuf? X uz lux blud. Wud Buddy buy my gun? Buddy uz “muddy muddy mulx-n-juzz.” jud wuk duwn. buy un gun. wuf? X gunny buy my bulb. fun, fun. X—wud ug guy, wud ug [...]

Pool: 5 Choruses By Endi Bogue Hartigan Omnidawn, 2014 ISBN 978-1890650926 It troubles me when readers and writers of poetry insist that “postmodernist” poetry doesn’t make any sense, inherits no concept of consequence, and ultimately leaves all sense of meaning uncertain and equivocated. The fact is that good postmodernist poetry simply succeeds at depicting certain ideas in a way that demands the reader to twist (as the phrases do) his or her own imagination so that they might only skirt the meaning enough to get a hint of the overarching intent. And no, the reader may never succeed in harnessing exactly what the poet meant. But good postmodernist poetry at least allows the reader more agency in determining the meaning. As Derrida insists, it allows the reader “free-play.” Endi Bogue Hartigan’s latest collection “Pool: 5 Choruses” is not only what I would refer to as an opportunity for free-play, it [...]

love on the windswept Cartesian plane — 1. Forth from the intersecting origin each number is newly born and ages as it goes this is the realm of the rich and the shallow, an empty quadrant where they think they exist but to imagine you and all you love can be positive pushes you out of the plane, into imaginary numbers. — 2 and 4. If negative multiplies with positive their creation is incomplete a kind of un-being negative numbers have empty hearts, must reach out to others alike else we are bound to fall into shadow quadrants that measure loss like childhood fears, doubts trapped in closets — 3. While hopes lie hidden in the un-space behind mirrors and old bookshelves waiting for backwards and down to see all the others are empty like them then (and only) creation is positive and all finally find balance. ___________________________________________________ Erik Richardson [...]

the birthbone’s connected to the deathbone I am setting a place for each person I love, so they will be comfortable when they set down and start to talk. The morning comes, the morning lates. The lake around which people gather claps its light applause. The people who I love are growing infections. They florally reconstitute. I am wishing their stamens. I am unconscious. What lips these flowers will vaunt. The content is set neutrally. We wonder how to marble each audible shift in tone. For instance, when addressing the child you were, I am a foreign stance; but when addressing the adult you were, I am dancing. The lake stills. Going out to take pictures of these different versions of ourselves, we shade without corollary, we color and color without any line meaning less. The things that feed us the justice of the megaphone in a tube or glass-like [...]

Am Ha’aretz* In the gardens of givat ram We never saw Solomon’s turtledoves For seven years the winter And the rain she and I Strangers in the midrahov she and I Cracked cobblestone Once a market road Deserted on a sabbath evening All the jackals are gone And every day in july Tempting that last stretch of sky she and I The end so close we lied Beyond reach somewhere the mountains in the mountains Among lotus shrubs in the Galilee she and I never saw Wild goats rising up In contest the grackles Picking off their parasites And what of those nights In the snow in the snow Sweeping the midrahov Those nights when I was repossessed By am ha’aretz After I lost her In ammei ha’aretz These roads I do not know I do not know her arms anymore her arms those child’s songs in arabic when I [...]

AND SO IT IS BECAUSE OF THE LICHEN Gathering the facts like so many bones. They make a good tool for telling you I am in love. With the flint, I tear one open, climb in, and speak: hold me close like a crucifix above the river. I cannot cross it the way I would my heart. […]

From Crawlspace Sonnet (3) I look through the blind slats at work. Everyone has a spiral ham fetish. What is the difference between A house and a mall really? Then there’s the classic photo Of the bride leaning down To give her attention to The young flower girl at her wedding, And there’s the door my grandma Would open and I would have To hide my chillum pipe, Lighting a stick of purple rain incense You and your family can live here Pay rent and/or mortgage Sonnet (10) I smell myself In order to start over Since everybody is so Terribly clean these days. At the baby shop The cribs have names Hampton, Worthington, & the Shenandoah, cooling in around 800 ducats. Everything is loud all the time now. They growl happily at rollerbladers Wearing “Fight the Power” cotton tees Somebody has a new idea about 21st century slum clearance [...]

INTRO: In what we hope will be a regular feature, THEthe Poetry will be showcasing presses–of all backgrounds, ambitions, and oeuvres. Each feature will include some questions about the press and a sampler of the published work. The first featured press is Called Back Books. —a new press run out of Oakland, CA and crafted by the poets Sharon Zetter and Lucas M. Rivera—stresses the import of THE BOOK and will be focusing on small volumes from emerging writers, highlighting the discourse of POETRY and a range of mediums germane to the question of ART, METAPHYSICS, LANGUAGE, ETHICS, ETC. CALLED BACK BOOKS will also make exacting efforts to generate dialogue within a narrow sense of the poetry community and will not stray from polemical, argumentative, and outright adversarial discourses (while avoiding ad hominem, cliché, and juvenile antics). CALLED BACK BOOKS deemphasizes the temporary for the temporal and aligns itself with [...]