Hear the audio version of this poem . Hear the audio version of this poem . Hear the audio version of this poem . Meg Cowen writes, paints on canvas and builds furniture in her old New Hampshire farmhouse. Some of her recent work appears in PANK, Whiskey Island, Passages North and interrupture. She edits Pith, a journal of experimental writing, and lives online at www.megcowen.com.

True Ugliness: Cate Marvin’s Oracle by KT Billey People are fucked up and funny, and so is the world. This is a fact that Oracle (Norton, 2015), Cate Marvin’s third and most recent collection of poems, bestows upon us, and it’s clear from the get-go that anyone looking for soothsaying better look elsewhere. Or consider what soothsaying means. The very first line throws us into a sharp, observant speaker who sees and understands being seen: As the leering boss poised by a photocopier… There is no false advertising in this book’s truth-promise title, nor are these poems riddles. “On the Ineptitude of Certain Hurricanes,” the introductory poem, sets a scene for many readers—likely the east coast, a couple years ago, but if not in a particular time and place, surely in a post-natural disaster mood. A bit of dread and relief, perhaps, but mostly attitude. This human dares to critique [...]

Portrait of Thumbelina As A Poet Like ducks, she moves in circles: old tattered lamentations, same fears to excavate, this eternal wait for fingers other than her own to hold open the book. A loss of faith in what the city knows. The scent of the rickety lemons on the sidewalk, the rains from under the streetlights,the palimpsests of the potholed sidewalks. Assurance of scripted disobedience, the maroon ruptures in the city’s maps. She writes the names of her other lovers on her wrists, her palms– places from which her husband won’t be able to avert his eyes. In this city where poems flow like snot, where poets infest both homes and gutters like mosquitoes, she is just another housewife striving to be a poet. Unable to tear apart her quilt of slumber, afraid of severance. An incomplete rebellion, a collage of cliches: in loss of new rhymes, rhythms, plot-lines. [...]

I asked the poet to talk with me a little bit about the genesis and refinement of her new book, , which is excerpted today at Poetry Blog. (And please see the end of the Q&A for a brief note from her publisher about his grassroots micropress, Grand Concourse!) Fox Frazier-Foley: I really loved this book, and I’m so excited to talk with you about your process in creating it. Can you tell me a little bit about how you started the project? How did you come up with the character, the name, the gender or lack thereof? Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie: Only the first letter was my idea. I wrote it because I was angry about things I was seeing on the poetry scene among poets of color. Poetry seemed, to me, to have become about pedigree and careerism almost overnight. As a poet, I “wasn’t raised like that.” I [...]

Letter One Dear Continuum: I got an issue of Poets and Writers in the mail yesterday. I enjoyed what I read, but it was not inspiring at all. It was realistic. It was honest about the uphill battle it is to get a book seen. I know the work of this all too well. But this letter is not about books, this is about voice and the love and armor you will need to have yours heard. When I think about being a writer in 2015, being a writer with a Black woman’s voice— as Lucille Clifton said, “I am a black woman poet…and I sound like one”—with no agent, no powerful mentor opening doors, no financial support, no salary, no benefits, then I realize that this really is a crazy path. Deciding to be a writer was beautiful. Writing is beautiful. Deciding that my concerns, dreams, hopes, and voice [...]

Deep in a forest in the Northernmost part of Vietnam, in a Vietcong reeducation camp, my father watched to see if the chili peppers would spin in the clear water. If the peppers were still, then the water was not poisonous. Father said the best way to get water was to cut a bamboo tree or a banana tree with a knife. The water in the heart is pure. Mother When I hug my mother, she feels so fragile as if she would fall apart like petals in my arms, but I know she is much stronger than I am - silk that keeps me cool in the summer and warm in the winter. The soft and gentle thread of worms, tougher than metal. Praying at the Cemetery on Con Son Island Endless gravestones unnamed a yellow star on each stone lights the night I try not to breathe in [...]

Phantasmagoric Bed Time Story: Otherworldly Shifts Bring Us Back Home In Elizabeth Cantwell’s debut poetry collection, Nights I Let the Tiger Get You (Black Lawrence Press, 2014), we traverse dangers across a tangible universe and seek respite in dream-like interludes; both planes of existence feel familiar. A child pets a fawn. Then a body is pulled out of a bottle drifting in the ocean. Cantwell cannot possibly warn us about all the dangers this universe contains and yet she is continually attempting to warn us. As William Blake wrote his eighteenth century poem, “The Tyger,” What immortal hand or eye Dare frame thy fearful symmetry? so Cantwell attempts to draw her readers through dichotomous worlds. Blake questions, how can the same being that made the lamb create the tiger? Cantwell answers, using a nuanced palette of language. On one side is daily life: Cantwell illustrates a cat “licking a knuckle,” [...]

I asked Bay Area slam poet B Deep to share some of his amazing spoken-word pieces with us in the Infoxicated Corner. Thrilled to be including some work by STAGE poets as well as all the PAGE poets we’ve been blessed to host. Enjoy these three performances, below! Brennan/ ‘B Deep’ DeFrisco likes words and the way they move. He is an organizer and performer at the Berkeley Poetry Slam and will represent them in the upcoming 2015 National Poetry Slam. He is co-founder of Lucky Bastard Press and author of Highku: 4 & 20 Poems About Marijuana. His work can be found or is forthcoming in TheThe Poetry’s Infoxicated Corner, Drunk Monkeys, Hermeneutic Chaos Literary Journal, Yellow Chair Review, & JMWW’s Exquisite Duet. He loves a particularly beautiful and talented woman, movies, poker, whiskey, and Firefly.

I asked poet and tattoo artist Ruth Awad to share some of her favorite pieces she’s done with us in our most Infoxicated of internet Corners. The results are so fabulous. Check out these samples of her tattoo work, as well as a poem by her that she says is her current favorite! I couldn’t be happier to feature her here. Enjoy! Lessons in Grief If you’re gone I mean really gone, then whose voice is that veining through the shower drain – no, it’s only water, but here I am, half wet and stung with the mercy of living where your robe trailed like a thought across the kitchen floor and my hands are filling with dirt. Or is it water? Tell me a well is enough to hold me. Or is it just the bats sweeping low enough to feel like comfort? I’m a clockwork animal tied to [...]

NOCTURNE IN WHICH WE FAIL YET AGAIN TO HAVE SEX IN YOUR PARENTS’ HOT TUB Your breasts at the surface of the roiling water. The smell of chlorine and desire. We divide and assign the space between us. Your specialty is keeping score, mine is pretending not to. We are not supposed to stay in water this hot more than 15 minutes. Plenty of time to pretend we could not drown here or anywhere in the middle of our own lives. Three walls away our children dream of life without us, your parents sleep with their television on. One of us slides closer. One of us places a finger in the other’s mouth, one of us stands, dripping, to reach for a towel. The tub’s motor falls quiet. The air suddenly cold against overheated skin. Absence swells to fill absence, water closes in over the holes our bodies once filled. [...]

The Size of Things, Decreasing Scale 1) An invitation 2) The gap between the door open and latched 3) Your open hand resting on my hip 4) Kittens past weaning 5) This human heart quickening 6) A young fist full of garden dirt 7) The curve of your lips 8) The tip of my finger brushing your ear 9) Flat headed worms aerating the soil 10) An avian heart beating 11) Your pupils grown wide soaking light 12) A bean seed to be planted 13) My pupils when fixated 14) The distance between your thumb and my neck 15) Bristles on my paint brush, dried slate clinging 16) Strawberry seeds set to germinate 17) How close my lips hover above yours 18) Capillaries dilating 19) Rushing red blood cells 20) A droplet of sweat drawn from the pores 21) The width of a strand of spider silk 22) The wavelength [...]

All The Rage: The Fashion in Our Fury is Little More than a Refusal to Engage by Saba Razvi Slate.com features a gallery on its website called “The Year of Outrage,” in which it showcases a breakdown of the trending topic of outrage for each day of the year 2014. Yes, that’s right – each day. There are no date-gaps in the gallery, and it is easy to see that on every single day of the year, someone was outraged about something and took to the Internet to make that rage known by way of action. With so much impeccable anger, one might think that some significant progress may have been made on at least one of those 365 fronts, that beyond a trending melodrama of expression, some change or activism might, at least, have been seeded in the collective community to address so much grievance in meaningful ways. One [...]

Letter from the Back Porch Quiet things are passageways to other quiet things. One cracks, another grows. Grass gives up to dust. Somewhere, clocks advance while other clocks reverse, the hissing continuous, a slow release. I would never ask you to come back as I don’t contain ideas like come back or I, or you. In the space below, snouting visitors, they come, they go. Something scrapes and once– the hollow beat of dancing. _________________________________________ Sara Biggs Chaney received her Ph.D. in English in 2008 and currently teaches first-year and upper-level writing in Dartmouth’s Institute for Writing and Rhetoric. Her most recent chapbook, Ann Coulter’s Letter to the Young Poets, was released from dancing girl press in November, 2014. Sara’s poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in RHINO, Sugar House Review, Columbia Poetry Review, [PANK], Juked, Thrush Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. You can catch up with Sara at sarabiggschaney.com.

The World Is at Stake: Sci-Fi/Fantasy, Internet Activism, and Reverberations in the Hyperbolic Chamber by Saumya Arya Haas “Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.” (Translation: “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”) – Bad Latin / necessary advice from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale As a long-time Science Fiction/Fantasy (SF/F) fan, I’ve been following the controversy over this year’s . Two activist groups calling themselves the and feel that, in recent years, this prestigious SF/F award has wrongly honored more “literary” books, often by women and minority writers, which feature liberal social themes over “traditional” writers, styles, and themes. They organized a response. According to : As usual, the [Hugo Award] finalists were determined by ballot; any member of the 2014, 2015, or 2016 WorldCons (that is, any fan who shelled out the requisite $40 to sign up for one of those conventions) could vote. And yet the names and works that [...]

Some Things Never Change: Outrage and Persuasion in Online Literary Debate by Michael Simon Recent events have provided plenty of opportunities to diagnose the culture of debate in our online literary communities, as well on the Internet more generally, from the controversial essay by Elizabeth Ellen at Hobart to the conversations prompted by Jesse Bradley’s poem “A Mother’s Advice,” published at Lockjaw, and the Ted Hash-Berryman interview at Queen Mobs Teahouse.1 That the responses to these controversial works have entailed outrage is not a surprise, nor is this necessarily a bad thing. Outrage-based responses can be productive, but they are of limited value when used as part of a larger, forceful strategy for “winning” a debate that emphasizes rejecting an opponent’s speech out of hand, and the atmosphere they create can complicate efforts to persuade by putting participants on the defensive. In response to recent allegations of abuse by men [...]