On This Side In the dream father was finished with me. He was dressed for work or moving on. Whichever it was he would soon be gone– his silence a warning, in his gaze regret: whatever it was he had wished for me hadn’t happened yet and by now probably never would. The window framed [...]

Maria, thanks for agreeing to this interview. I wanted to start by discussing your book Writing Poetry to Save Your Life, particularly the idea of “personal poetry.” Could you start by explaining what your vision of that is? My vision of poetry is that it should be based on some essential truth about what it [...]

Bliss April loves a challenge, choosing to split the slab of winter-hardened earth with the silk tongue of a crocus. She casts the stiffened brooks as her fandango dancers. At first they crack and groan, call her the cruelest of taskmasters but April persists, persuades: the streams ripple, sequined and agile. For April even forgotten [...]

Prayer for Topaz, 1942 Dear God, Mom said you are busy and don’t have time to listen to a little 8-year-old Negro girl from North Carolina and her foolishness, like praying for a box of candy. That would be selfish. But if it’s really important she said, then I should take it to you in [...]

First Thaw This morning was the first time: all the snow that buried us receding, still in drifts piled high, crusted with ice and yet receding, slowly drawing back—abandoned cars revealed, crushed grass, the shattered road ice-slicked, salt-splashed, slush running downstream, breaking up over the drains, dissolving….All this time I thought the whole world lost, [...]

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 [...]