BEND TO IT BY KEVIN SIMMONDS SALMON POETRY 2014 ISBN 978-1908836793 When the young Miyamoto Usagi (from the pages of the Stan Sakai comic Usagi Yojimbo) won his first tournament, his reward was a pair of swords. The katana was named “Yagi no Eda” (or ‘Willow Branch’); and the short sword was name Aoyagi, or [...]
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 [...]
Innocence In the middle of summer, when it’s too hot for cargo shorts and the air is heavy to breathe, I let my mouth slide open into a slippery smirk, as I watch Michael Ritter, the boy you loved in 5th grade, on the local news. “Dear Michael, I really, really like you…” your 5th [...]
THE BROTHERS PERDENDO AND PERDENDOSI BY BRIAN TRIMBOLI RELEASED BY NO, DEAR MAGAZINE AND SMALL ANCHOR PRESS This is how terrible of a reader I can be: didn’t even think to look up “perdendo” or “perdendosi” until after I’d read this chapbook at least four times, the first two in quick succession immediately after it [...]
Leatherbar in Louisville (owed) The city hums traffic through lights, blinking eyes right before sleep, a flatline pattern, automated efficiency designed to pull cars through midnight into dawn. I fall inside, privy to dulled movement, beer foaming to a quiet stasis, smoke veiling the bartender and patrons. Smells of gin, sweat, amyl, tool and product [...]
To introverts writers are glamorous. I am reading Joan Didion’s Blue Nights and enjoying it, but I hate those who feel they own Joan Didion. I don’t know how many others feel this way, but I often become irate over the ownership of issues and artists. Nothing will make me back off an issue or [...]
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 [...]
This is my favorite Emily Dickinson poem, even though it is not her best. It is the poem for which I have the most affection: 348 I dreaded that first Robin, so, But He is mastered, now, I’m accustomed to Him grown, He hurts a little, though— I thought If I could only live Till [...]
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 [...]
In 1985, two professors of physics published some research about the extent to which a physics class impacted students’ intuitive understanding of motion. Like most of us, the students had a more Aristotelian model–the one that seems to fit with common sense: e.g., heavy objects fall faster rate than lighter ones. The goal was to [...]
I remember the 90s much better than the 80s because the 90s pissed me off. First, everyone started going grunge, but hell, I had worn flannels and work boots, and funky ski caps back in the friggin 70s and no one gave me credit for it. They told me I was a sloppy dresser. I [...]
In many of the pieces I’ve turned in for a Creative Writing class, they’ve been returned with red ink underlining the first line, usually with comments like “This needs to have more impact” or “How does this draw in the reader?” Plus, there’s always one class period dedicated entirely to the crafting of the first [...]
Ariana Nadia Nash is a poet of the body, like Neruda, like Whitman, but her poems do not move with Neruda’s desire-driven caprice, nor do they swell with Whitman’s electric and expansive equation of body and soul. Rather, they proceed with the structured precision of a surgeon (the title of her prize-winning collection is revealing [...]
Augustine never says an angel spoke to him. Rather it is a child nearby: I heard a voice from a neighboring house. It seemed as if some boy or girl, I knew not which, was repeating in a kind of chant the words: “Take and read, take and read.” Immediately with changed countenance (note the [...]
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: [...]
I thought since I had to witness a whole bunch of snotty poets dissect the working class poets (or lack thereof) on a thread today, I’d have some fun and brand them as they brand folks like me. First this is the general gist of what they inferred. All white working class people have disappeared. [...]
