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 [...]

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 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 [...]

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 [...]

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 have always admired how Jay Thompson’s poems approach meaning by backing away from it, inhabiting that paradox of quantum observation, that one’s gaze affects reality. In this excerpt from Winter, it is not the superfice, but the essence that is mutable: “day to day only essences change”. A counter-intuitive statement, which perhaps makes more [...]