Candor Here, Lustre There In memory of Paul Violi To keep my friends is my delight so in this book I pray you’ll write quoth Miss Aurelia to her twins you who are younger than them remember the wealthy all leaving for a living our feathers! I’ve moulted only Liberace— insincere shadow not lacking boring parts but oh the many tiny weathers never played on a priceless piano thoughts which follow cigs lose places in another wobbly line messy breath toute l’âme resumée may you sit on the tack of knowledge and rise to the chair of success Several loudly splayed from a hard spin with something too pink to stay in glass preferable chair of your perpendicular dance isn’t now this evening’s entertainment you mean the Habanera what was that maiden collapsed! and when she fell you called me lady beefsteak when you’re hungry champagne when you’re dry money [...]

The second line of Ben Fama’s chapbook New Waves, (Minutes Books 2011), is “All I want is my life/ to matter somehow.” And it seems that this book sets out to execute that statement despite the line’s futility. I say this with sincerity since it’s an important aspect of the human condition (especially for writers) but remains an ungraspable, continuous pursuit. In short, this is a book composed with clear-minded longing. The cultural awareness is unpretentious, the feeling is real, and the structures are solid. There’s been a post about Ben Fama’s poetry brooding in me since his last chapbook, Aquarius Rising, came out from Ugly Duckling Presse in 2010, and that’s because his poetry sticks with me. The word “hipster” has been thrown around a bit in reviews, but I find the term superfluous and dismissing. The difference between Ben Fama’s poems and many of his so-called hipster contemporaries [...]

First things, first. Full disclosure: Tom Sleigh was my teacher and thesis advisor at Hunter College. Fuller disclosure: my admiration for Tom’s poetry outweighs any personal loyalty to Tom (though I have that too). * * * Tom Sleigh’s method is art, but his end is anthropological. His vision is fully humane, an attempt to catalogue people, events, and his own place among them. Because of this, one might be surprised that this collection begins with a three part series of poems that picture a lively army scene populated by anthropomorphized cats. In this opening poem, readers find the sheer pleasure of reading Sleigh’s poetry. His idiom is musical, yet speechly: Over by the cemetery next to the CP you could see them in wild catmint going crazy: I watched them roll and wriggle, paw it, lick it, chew it, leap about, pink tongues stuck out, drooling. Cats in the [...]

For fans, the six years spent with LOST, one of the most ambitious and transformative shows in the history of television, are hard to replace. Especially disconcerting are the number of network simulacra that have tried to fill its shoes. (witness FastForward and The Event). In many ways LOST aired during what we might call the Golden Age of Television, alongside The Sopranos, The Wire, Deadwood, Battlestar Galactica, Dexter, the list goes on. Many of these shows have concluded their runs, and while AMC picks up the slack with the stellar Mad Men and Breaking Bad, the pay channels continue to attempt high budget shows that always seem doomed to cancellation – see The Borgias and Game of Thrones, who run the risk of going the way of Rome, Deadwood, and Carnivale. So, for the nostalgic, and as an anniversary of sorts, I want to share with you a conference [...]

I had a few reasons to pick up Geraldine Brooks’ new novel Caleb’s Crossing. First, it’s a new book by a semi-important author, which has received mostly good reviews in major newspapers. Second, it takes place at Harvard, and I thought it would be a good read for my trip there for a conference. But most importantly, I have just begun a dissertation on contemporary novels that take place in the colonial period. So, Caleb’s Crossing, the story of the first Native American to graduate from Harvard, in 1665, seemed to fit the bill. It does and it doesn’t. My work focuses on the novels, which have come to be called “historiographic metafictions,” that fall under the umbrella of postmodernism, novels like Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon and Vollmann’s Argall. Through the depiction of historical events and figures in an ironic light, they foreground the fluidity and downright unknowability of the [...]

REVENGE OF ALL THAT IS CAPABLE OF BEING REVENGED

After Catullus and Horace only the manners of centuries ago can teach me how to address you my lover as who you are O Sestius, how could you put up with my children thinking all the while you were bearing me as in your mirror it doesn’t matter anymore if spring wreaks its fiery or lamblike dawn on my new-found asceticism, some joke I wouldn’t sleep with you or any man if you paid me and most of you poets don’t have the cash anyway so please rejoin your fraternal books forever while you miss in your securest sleep Ms. Rosy-fingered dawn who might’ve been induced to digitalize a part of you were it not for your self-induced revenge of undoneness it’s good to live without a refrigerator! why bother to chill the handiwork of Ceres and of Demeter? and of the lonesome Sappho. let’s have it warm for now. [...]

This evening at Catholic mass, while everyone bowed their heads to pray, I asked Jesus not only to help me be good to my husband and my family, but also what he thought about my poetry. I heard a voice, perhaps in my head, or perhaps funneled out the church ceiling which said, “your poetry will touch a few hearts, but it won’t help you in heaven.” Granted, I am aware that it is a bit presumptuous to ask the son of God what he thinks of your poetry. But it had me considering the worth of poetry, and what it means in the grand scheme of things, in relation to other aspects of life, that when you weigh them for their importance, are likely more spiritually imminent. I mentioned this to my husband, the poet Joe Weil, and he said, “You were listening. That is exactly what I would [...]

Okay! Fine. Tea Obreht is a veritable prodigy, and The Tiger’s Wife is uncannily good. Most (no, all) reviewers, as well as the likes of Colum McCann, TC Boyle, and Ann Patchett, say no less. But this novel is not just good for a twenty-five year old. Most of us would kill to kill it like she does. It’s a story told by a young doctor named Natalia, who travels through an unnamed Balkan nation, having been, about to be, and, maybe, perpetually always, war-ravaged, inoculating children, deriding (but perhaps eventually acquiescing to) local superstition, and, most importantly, seeking out the facts of her grandfather’s last days before his death by cancer. But the reader quickly comes to realize that the collection of a plastic bag full of Natalia’s grandfather’s personal effects fails to explain the man she loved. Rather, his stories, which she re-tells with elaborate and emotional texture, [...]

VII Beneath the black jungle palms, monkeys. They remind me of me, my tools, my cartoon heart that’s shaped like a heart. Other better animals are pronounced as being heavenly, in this native island tongue. I’m not true and I’m not free, I know I should go somewhere official, somewhere right, like make my way back to the mainland, get home from my violet days of taming parrots and sunburn. If I could slather on my own tame desires instead of the monkey’s touch while I sleep, I would not want but still I would burn and for next to nothing. Some coconut milk, a better name, this is no way to get back home. There’s time. Turn black. IX Saying the word sonar is satisfying. During the Cuban Crisis, we smoked sugarcane and they dropped depth charges by our family home. I watched one soldier walk into the river [...]

Canoe How might we & the waters labor over now the new naming of the rapid by those who first travel that stretch of river named rightfully The Bronco after the tributary from the South & also after the way in which they advise it be treated as a Bronc be loose in the hips guided by The Elder look into his eyes his bluebeard braid please expect the shortest rapture as danger in those fleets that fly through the body where the past itself flees then fixates from the gulches to the minarets then from the moment to the map made from the legends told of that voyage by first the namers then the Russian trappers the bartenders the riverguides then the fieldguide sold with illustration ________________________________________ Dawn Marie Knopf is a writer-in-residence with California Poets in the Schools. Her poems have appeared in the Boston Review, Bomb, Black [...]

This entry is part of a series, Poetry and Loss» , Poetry and Loss» , Poetry and Loss» The poet who saved my life never existed for me in his native language. He died fifteen years before I was born. His name is Miguel Hernandez, and he will never be as well known in English as Lorca, Jimenez, or Machado, but he is my poet, the one I would take with me into exile. When I first met one of his poems I was a senior in high school and my mother had just died. She did not die prettily. I remember the good Catholic liberals in my school showed a film on how a good Catholic family should behave during a terminal illness. I sat in the class growing more and more enraged. I shouted at the teacher: “There’s no right way to behave fuck face,” and stormed out [...]

Dear James, Everyone here is talking about you—myself included. Most of it is the expected back-and-forth, will-he-won’t-he sort of thing, though, personally, I like to imagine you will, and that (because you are, I assume, exactly like your character on Freaks and Geeks), you’ll be slumped over in the back of Intro to Doctoral Studies carving something like “Disco Sucks” into the faux-wood desk with a penknife. We look over at each other all like “whatever” and after class we get some beers and talk about the Astros or Hart Crane or Anne Hathaway (Coming to visit? Really? That’s awesome! I guess we can all get together and go bowling or something). On the other hand, fantasies of us being best friends aside, I have what feel like legitimate fears of you stealing my girlfriend or having no one ever want to talk to me at parties. Either way, for [...]

Extract from My Ragged Company, #19 I asked Alice to ask me to marry her. She asked if I wanted to lick the painting on the hotel wall. That’s a poster, I said. Just a paper Hopper: a sad woman in a red teddy sat on a hotel bed reading a yellow letter: He’s not coming back. I asked for a kiss. She asked for a testament. Outside, I asked a man to point me to a lake or a liquor store. In Michigan, the man said, a liquids most obvious attribute is repression. But, he said, all taverns in Michigan share one trait: inside is someone that will make you feel at home. I followed his pointer. I walked across the street. I took the ferry. I climbed a hill and a tree and sat in a deer blind for a week until two hunters found me and took [...]

City Lights Books just published Compression & Purity, a new poetry book by L.A.-based African-American surrealist, Will Alexander. Alexander writes densely textured “psychedelic” or scientific surrealism with a strong affinity for arcane vocabulary. “On Scorpions & Swallows” begins: Not claimed by the accessible as contrast or as competition by loss or mathematics by peril but occlusion as opposable phylums minus a dark synesthesial as rote minus the axial smoke of a rotted bonfire hamlet I mean oasis as savage dialectic rotation meaning species as aggressive salt as curious vertical blazing in reversed arrayal I think of interior cobalt swallows with predacious ignition a contradictory igniting beautific with scopolamine I am struck with Alexander’s careful phrasings, his manipulation of thematic shape and his mastery of extensions. For instance, the poetry quoted above, “On Scorpions & Swallows,” reads like a single, extended sentence creating a sonnet-like problem-and-answer structure to the poem. Alexander [...]