Poets Out Loud – serie

Winner of the 2001 Poets Out Loud Prize, Door to Door ranges from the wry romance of "Changing the Oil" ("You make love the way you change the oil in your Oldsmobile") to the salesman in the title poem who sees "what the glacier sees in the onslaught of spring." The poems stand at the crossroads of mystery and love, hoping to trade their soul for Federico García Lorca's guitar, or perhaps Jimi Hendrix'.

Hearsay celebrates a woman's life from childhood to middle age, including the often-ignored subject of work, with a voice that is sometimes tender, sometimes whimsical, but always strong. The winner of the 2003 Poets Out Loud Prize, this collection "proffers craft and vision; it begins, one might say, in delight and ends in wisdom" (Robert Wrigley, judge).To read a sample of her poetry, visit www.poetsoutloud.com.

WhetherAligned with the mechanismwhereby the spirit is borne aloftthrough song comes againthe question: whether. And not soothedso much as opened by the boysoprano's Sanctus, what movesin the mind as the throat constrictsin sympathy, one note peeledfrom the last, fine as paper slippedfrom a garlic bulb, veined,translucent, is whether—as ifwound through the spiralingamplitude, purpled, fretted,one voice suspendedin concentration of prayer or terrorwills itself above faltering,more perfect since time mustsoon break it. And made it.Whether and by whatever impossiblearrangement of stars, harmonies,correspondences through whichthe music finds the spirit and likea blade slits and releases,circulates the questionthrough the phrase, the delicateengine—as if it matters: the songrises, everything goes with it.The poems in Crocus take as their starting points the interior universes created by myth, art, andmemory, and through the exploration of these terrains create new ways of understanding the ordinary.

Winner of the PEN USA Literary Award in PoetryWinner of the Poets Out Loud Prize Multiversal, the second book by Amy Catanzano proposing a theory of quantum poetics, invites readers to explore the intersections between language, nature, science, and consciousness. Multiversal takes its name from the "multiverse," a science fiction concept that has become an accepted theory in physics. It suggests that reality comprises multiple dimensions in space and time. In form and content, this collection takes novel approaches to the materiality of language itself, to the spacetime of poems.From the Foreword by Michael Palmer: Amy Catanzano offers us a poetic vision of multiple orders and multiple forms, of a fluid time set loose from linearity and an open space that is motile and multidimensional. The work exists at once in a future-past and in a variety of temporal modes. At one moment the scale is intimate, at another infinite. She interrogates our means of observation and measurement (the telescope, the ice-core), our mappings, our cosmic calculations, our assumptions about cause and effect. In the background, "there is a war being fought," though which of many wars—cultural, scientific, military—we are not told. In a time of displacement such as ours, she seems to say, in place of "universals" we must imagine "multiversals," in place of the fixed, the metamorphic. As much as the frame may be cosmic (micro- or macro-), it is important to remember that the work serves the vital questions of the hereand-now, "the flowering of the world," the corrosiveness of violence, the primacy of desire, the necessity of wonder. Multiversal represents an effort to see things as they are through an act of poetic reimagining, that is, to see variously within the folds and fields of the actual, where the physis, or life force, resides.

Things That No Longer Delight Me is a collection of poems about family and memory. This book is filled with objects. The author writes:I like objects for company,to decorate the plainest spaces, decorumandI amass details,jade bracelet, her animal-printdresses, an oval coral cameo.How do objects counter loneliness, she asks, and speak to us of how to behave?In Things That No Longer Delight Me, lyric is driven by a compulsion or need to collect, in order to make sense of the past and stay connected to it.And what if that connection were to be lost? Confronting loss, the book pieces together a family history from stories fragmented and overheard. It asks: What is hearsay and what is history? It seeks to embody story, or historical detail, in lyric form. Resisting nostalgia, its poems respect what is diminished by grief or loss yet reveal details that hold sway over us and give us continuing pleasure.

The Hello Delay asks what happens around the saying of a thing and the receiving. Inside and outside of our daily communications, there are events, there are silences, déjà-vus, and intentions. These poems question the determined nature of our relationships to one another: What if this territory isn't familiar after all?I Will Whisperit to you so that someone else may hear it. whether or not it's heard by you, whether or not I hear it myself—that it is heard by a stranger.stranger and stranger. get out the fires and fire hoses, put away the stars. daybreak breaks into noon breaks into after, and after is a song, and singing makes you calmer. that's okay but what are they saying down the street and lost on you, lost on you, lost on you.In this human ecology, language is king. In this book, familiarity resides in memory or song, but perhaps nothing is so familiar as the experience of the present. What is it then to be present, when meaning persists among us? We are more than what we say and what we think, but these words are the lucite passages we travel to that aggregate.In this place where understanding means being wrong together or just pretending to be right, Choffel's poems honor the grandeur, the danger, and the mediocrity in manifesting what we make up as we go along. The Hello Delay might be experimental, but it is mostly experiential. It calls us out not to see how we will answer but to linger in the gaps of our refrain.

Continuous Frieze Bordering Red documents the migratory patterns of an Other, as she travels between countries, languages, seasons, and shifting identities. A narrative on hybridity, the text explores [dis]location as a cultural swerve while it interrogates Rothko's red: his bricked-in, water-damaged windows [floating borders], which reflect unstable cultural borders to the hybrid. A person of mixed race [hybrid, mongrel, mutt] traverses these "invisible" cultural borders repeatedly. Border identity comes with flux, instability, and vibrational pulls. An Other is marked as someone who does not belong. She is always a foreigner: when traveling and when at "home." She is cast aside, bracketed from the dominant culture. She is [neither][nor][both]. She exists in a liminal space: in place and displaced simultaneously. That is, her identity and body are peripatetic, which is reflected in the continuous horizontal frieze. The reader must literally cross the borders of each page in order to navigate each line of text, leaving the reader in constant motion as well. The poem also functions as an ekphrasis of Rothko's Seagram murals: Rothko writes that the paintings make the observers "feel that they are trapped in a room where all the doors and windows are bricked up." The hybrid is confined and isolated. Even though the Other is estranged from herself and desires a sense of cultural belonging, she ultimately wants to "acknowledge this scar tissue and proceed" so that she is not held to false measures of "purity." Continuous Frieze Bordering Red attempts to move away from pejorative definitions of "hybrid" and embrace the monstrous self.

Spoken on the margin between death and birth, reading and writing, separation and union, the poems of Errings address the absent—a lost leader, a remote love, a protege not yet born—and across those distances delineate the motion of consciousness as it passes from one body to the next. "Videos of Fish," the opening sequence, speaks to the spirit of the poet's late father, adapting devices from Dante, Tibetan metaphysicalphilosophy, and the biomechanics of the most primitive of vertebrate bodies, the fish, to envision paths of the disembodied soul. "How difficult it is to remain one person," the poet claims, echoing Czesław Miłosz; in its progress between persons, the collection's regular shifts in mode and form include the purgatorian tercet,the Japanese poetic diary, didactic verse, the Persian ghazal, the erasure, and the miniature.THE READERExperience among the waves allows one to limit the field. Each year he grew another soul, oblong, slightly pointed at the end, likean oar, its surface turned to the light.Blacken now and lift your news into the air.

Gray Matter navigates the slippage between waking and dreaming, thinking and being, reflecting the dynamic interplay of inner and outer worlds. The poems unravel the constructs of identity and the strange, subjective flow of experience as it intertwines with place, from the rugged American backcountry to vibrant terrains abroad—always tethered to childhood's grounding pull. A celebration of the unknown, the poems honor the innate curiosity that drives scientists, philosophers, and poets to pursue the mysteries of the brain. "At the heart of all of the questions in Gray Matter," writes Susan Wheeler, "is the dance, the negotiation, between imagination and science, perception and thought."

Gray Matter navigates the slippage between waking and dreaming, thinking and being, reflecting the dynamic interplay of inner and outer worlds. The poems unravel the constructs of identity and the strange, subjective flow of experience as it intertwines with place, from the rugged American backcountry to vibrant terrains abroad—always tethered to childhood's grounding pull. A celebration of the unknown, the poems honor the innate curiosity that drives scientists, philosophers, and poets to pursue the mysteries of the brain. "At the heart of all of the questions in Gray Matter," writes Susan Wheeler, "is the dance, the negotiation, between imagination and science, perception and thought."

In a stunning cycle of persona poems, Daneen Wardrop offers us a panoramic view of the inner lives of those forgotten among the violence and strife of the American Civil War: the nurse and the woman soldier, the child and the draftee, the prostitute, the black slave, and the Native American soldier. Each one speaks out to be seen and heard, bearing witness to the mundanity of suffering experienced by those whose presence was ubiquitous yet erased in the official histories of the War Between the States. Cyclorama takes its name from the theater-sized, in-the-round oil paintings popular in the late nineteenth century, and with each poem, Wardrop adds a panel to her expansive, engrossing portrait of the bloodshed and tears, the tedium and fear experienced by the Civil War living and the dying. With pathos and lyric force, she brings sharply into focus perspectives on an unfathomable experience we thought we already knew and understood.from "Women's Sanitary Corps"Sister, I link arms with youas we enter this log-steepled tent,white on the outside, but on the inside the deep maroon of thick-spackled, internal things. How can it be so simple here? Bed,man-- bed, man-- where the pain leaves no room for anything else. My mouth is dry.No, stay with me, these sheet-smoothed boys need us with their nocturnal eyes,not predatory but grieving,as good animals the body, not ready, not able to be ready. La, where did they put their good body?

In a stunning cycle of persona poems, Daneen Wardrop offers us a panoramic view of the inner lives of those forgotten among the violence and strife of the American Civil War: the nurse and the woman soldier, the child and the draftee, the prostitute, the black slave, and the Native American soldier. Each one speaks out to be seen and heard, bearing witness to the mundanity of suffering experienced by those whose presence was ubiquitous yet erased in the official histories of the War Between the States. Cyclorama takes its name from the theater-sized, in-the-round oil paintings popular in the late nineteenth century, and with each poem, Wardrop adds a panel to her expansive, engrossing portrait of the bloodshed and tears, the tedium and fear experienced by the Civil War living and the dying. With pathos and lyric force, she brings sharply into focus perspectives on an unfathomable experience we thought we already knew and understood.from "Women's Sanitary Corps"Sister, I link arms with youas we enter this log-steepled tent,white on the outside, but on the inside the deep maroon of thick-spackled, internal things. How can it be so simple here? Bed,man-- bed, man-- where the pain leaves no room for anything else. My mouth is dry.No, stay with me, these sheet-smoothed boys need us with their nocturnal eyes,not predatory but grieving,as good animals the body, not ready, not able to be ready. La, where did they put their good body?

A Provisional Map of the Lost Continent charts a territory built of speculative histories, indeterminate landscapes, and mock narratives, all of them at the threshold linking exterior and interior worlds. Their logic is highly grammatical and slyly confounding, perfectly clear and drawn from dream. It is here, "between / what is occluded and what has elapsed," that Mahrer's ambiguous, disordered subjects begin their journeys.

In this, her second collection of poetry, Nancy K. Pearson explores the possibilities of recovery and transformation in a world where "words cease to matter." The speaker attempts to reconcile the past—a past shadowed by depression, addiction, and misdiagnosis. Pearson refuses to end in a place of relief, asking, "[D]on't we all / fall into aggregate darkness / for something?" Instead, her poems meditate on the lyric of absence and fragmentation. Pearson's poems are restless, unsettling, and revelatory.

Rotary Devotion was written during a long period witnessing the collapse of democracy and the rise of fascism in the United States. The poems attempt to redeem time by surrendering to imagination, trusting the necessity of that process. As process, imagination changes as it transforms object and subject. The instability motivates the language within poems and between them. No persona is immune to this uncertainty, any attachment can be sacrificed. Likewise, any word might be summoned to the moment shaped by the grammar enough to cohere.In this engagement, the guiding concerns are sensation of the world and how best to love, the former to stay oriented, the latter to justify the effort. Body engages world on behalf of imagination which regards the two with suspicion but interest. However reluctantly, the body lives in the world under constant threat, the sensation of uniqueness in the individual a consciousness of the collective body's crisis as threat to its own survival. What is imagination's responsibility? How can poems be made?Writing poems, fixing words, is a kind of death the poems themselves consider. Imagination is the lively necessary. It moves through parts of the world and absorbs what nurtures it—the stubborn genius of homo erectus, remembered light in a photograph, music found and made, poem after poem considered, eternal weather, imagining history as it happens, what matters and what dies to other forms of matter. These poems offer intimate companionship to the reader's own voice, twin at times, antagonist at others, always a necessary and loving duet sharing genius and awe beyond personal identity which imagination knows as a barrier to love as much as an enticement. Irony is all the solace some poems offer, other times it allows a deeper vision of unity that begins where poems end.

The New York Editions borrows its title from The New York Edition, Henry James's name for Scribner's 1907-09 re-issue of his life-long output of novels and shorter fiction. If the homage of Snediker's second book of poems to the Jamesian oeuvre seems self-evident or obscure, to conceive of this poetry as a translation of James's prose somewhat misses the mark in terms of the former's unfolding investment in the vision of a dreamlike field belonging to neither one nor the other, so much as the deep sea dive of language in between, in the throes. These mesmeric poems are experimental meditations on the limbo of lost-in-translation as a multi-axial bardo between multiples lives and texts and those that follow, which they might foreseeably become were these poems not so distinctly wed to a jewel-like present tense driven by no single aesthetic principle save the one it immanently navigates. The multiple voices that call to us from this place are ghostlike, to the extent that the force of their coiled abandon feels tethered to bodies in no familiar way. Even at their most seductively wry or pining, these semblances of speech wash over the landscapes they're embedded in like a film's post-production score or the heady excrescence of lilies calling one's attention to an open window. At the same time, such lurid, queerly disembodied phenomena are richly studded, one might say, with a singular, uncanny material of their own, shot through with the tenacious, not-quite-phantom élan of desolation, remediating mirth and the renegade confusion of each with their respective, recollected forms. These are vigilant elegies, rough odes, songs of experience shy toward neither their own felt urgency nor the latter's tendency to spoil: baroque trauerspiel meets ghost-story in reverse, moonlight gleaming with the otherworldly shine of James Bidgood's lambent, mineral-oiled sea-bed. The New York Editions chronicles the effort of inhabiting while doing justice to the approximate wilderness of all those variously perceptible disturbances that set the world ajar just enough to feel the draught of an adjacent universe pouring in. "… and hope is the/ shells each morning small and cool// into which we hermits/ retract the startling// need of our/ claws."

WINNER OF THE MAINE LITERARY AWARD FOR POETRY!FINALIST FOR THE JULIE SUK AWARD!SELECTED AS ONE OF NPR'S 2018 GREAT READS!ONE OF BOOK RIOT'S 50 MUST READ POETRY COLLECTIONS OF 2019! In 1912 the State of Maine forcibly evicted an interracial community of roughly forty-five people from Malaga Island, a small island off the coast of Phippsburg, Maine. Though Malaga had been their home for generations, nine residents (including the entire Marks family) were committed to the Maine School for the Feeble Minded in Pownal, Maine. The others struggled to find homes on other islands or on the mainland, where they were often unwelcome. The Malaga school was dismantled and rebuilt as a chapel on another island. Seventeen graves were exhumed from the Malaga cemetery, consolidated into five caskets, and reburied at the Maine School for the Feeble Minded. Just one year after the start of the eviction proceedings, the Malaga community was erased.Midden confronts the events and over one hundred years of silence that surround this shameful incident in Maine's history. Utilizing a wide range of poetic styles—epistolary poems to ghosts, persona poems, erasure poems, interior poems, interviews and instructions, poems framed both in the past and in the present—Midden delves into the vital connections between land, identity, and narrative and asks how we can heal the generations and legacies of damage that result when all three of these are deliberately taken in an attempt to rob people of their very humanity. The book is a poetic excavation of loss, a carving of the landscape of memory, and a reckoning with and tribute to the ghosts we carry and step over, often without our even knowing it.

Xamissa is a book-length poem that sounds out the city of Cape Town in a joyful elegy for the city of alternate takes. Xamissa adapts the mythical name for the springs and streams running from Table Mountain to the sea, under the city itself, since before the colonial Dutch ships came—the X of the title standing in for the multiple ways in the languages of the Cape, past and present, the reader may pronounce the first consonant.A work of documentary poetics that investigates the cost of whiteness in South Africa, Xamissa code-switches at times into Lontara, the subversive Indonesian script that undercuts the prevalence of Dutch in the colonial archive. Through serial questions around the ethics of its address, Xamissa probes the interrelation of language, sociality, and resistance, in its bid to interrogate the archive as a draft of the city's future.

In scenery, lyric's public voice and memoir's personal reconciliations confront the archives of America's racial and legal histories, resulting in a genre-bending exploration of what it means to exist as oneself for an Other. The author, a Salvadorean immigrant and parent, reflects on the status of personhood in America between racial supremacy and racial disavowal, thinking through his own structural role as a naturalized citizen, and naturalization's historical condition in the denial of full legal and emotional Black personhood.This daring work delves into the archive of liberal humanism from colonial era writing on the competing status of slaves to the present, while the visual archive of public news provides an ekphrastic environment to the author's bigger lyric-memory: being the parent of a biracial American-born child in a contemporary era accentuated by violence, white nationalism, and fear. From seventeenth-century casta paintings up to contemporary coverage of domestic unrest and riots, from the delivery room to scenes of parenthood, Alvergue ponders: What is the kind of emotion a face demonstrates, or a body, an assembly? scenery approaches, in an asymptotic manner, the empathy we come to feel when the language we've made is dulled by the roles we are also expected to occupy against one another.

NAMED THE BEST POETRY OF 2020 BY THE NEW YORK TIMESMy Daily Actions, or The Meteorites is the result of a daily investigative writing practice, in which I was worried that a poem invested in the particulars of my life would be uninteresting—that the "ordinary" would be mundane. Instead memory, dreams, and the associative power of the imagination filled each moment with meaning, each tv show I watched or friend I spoke with, each outfit I wore or nail polish color I chose. In these poems, a combination of dread (for something approaching) and anxiety (for what might be approaching but isn't yet known) undid a sense of the present separate from climate change, global racial capitalism, whiteness, and gender-based violence, especially as I wrote as I tried to find out how my own gender fit into the world. The prose poem is the vehicle by which a recording practice ("journaling") meets the associative power of the poem.

An electrifying feminist poetics combining language and visual collage to explore gender, landscape, taxidermy, and the idea of a "natural body"An innovative book-length poem that delves into the intricacies of natural history dioramas, taxidermy, landscape, and women naturalists, Her Wilderness Will Be Her Manners is an experience of looking for "Woman's Work" in American natural history museums. Why, for instance, have the contributions of taxidermist and naturalist Martha Maxwell, the first person to create a "habitat group" display in the United States, and Delia Akeley, the wife of the "father of modern taxidermy," been largely erased?Sarah Mangold mines language from natural history texts and taxidermy manuals from the 1800s to explore the perception and the reception of women in male-dominated scientific pursuits, as well as the doctrine of nature as pure, unpopulated, and outside historical and political time. A stunning work of visual and textual collage, Her Wilderness Will Be Her Manners creates a vibrant textual ecology that utilizes language as landscape while reshaping notions of nature and the natural.

A collection of poems that contemplate the bureaucracy of the mind through interior political cabinetsTaking its name from the banal, purgatorial space outside (but inside) a doctor's office, Well Waiting Room imagines the conversations we have with ourselves at this liminal site as an exchange between interior bureaucrats, each of whom governs a particular aspect of the psyche. The poems explore the dynamics of this political ministry, which includes the Cabinets of Desire, Indulgences, Self-Preservation, Ordinary Affairs, Ambivalence, Confrontations, and many others—there's even a press secretary, a curator, and a general counsel. Like a cabinet of curiosity wrapped in red tape, the poems examine the compartmentalization of the mind and the confounding news of the day.Formally, the poems range from dramatic monologues to combative sonnets, quippy memos to voice-y prose blocks, incantatory interludes to dreamlike visual landscapes. Sometimes, the poems address a purely internal conflict: Why do we lie to ourselves, indulge in schadenfreude, repeat the same mistakes? Other times, the poetic lens points outward like a spear, confronting the external universe: social injustice, polar ice melt, the Trump administration, and other man-made disasters. But in both universes, the poems find joy: the first observation of gravitational waves, the otherworldly beauty of rare marine species, the discovery that you are your own best way out.For Schlaifer, the underlying question is an epistemological one, an ontological one, a theological one. Why are we here, how do we know things, and why does God—so often—seem to be working against us? In Schlaifer's bureaucratic vision of the mind, readers will see their own internal voices affectingly (and often humorously) reflected. The book traverses unknowable terrain in sturdy boots. It unearths not answers but better questions for our time.

Boats in the Attic is a sweeping, poignant exploration of what it means to be an individual and, in particular, what it means to be a parent of young children, in our current time of crisis. Errands must be run, the radio plays, and the child wants the birthday girl's balloon—all while sea levels are rising and wild wolves roam the acres of Chernobyl, "developing a cryptography to a century / to which we are not invited."In this dynamic collection, Powell intersperses lyric flight and prose fragments with metacommentary, nuance, and a beguiling sense of humor. At the same time, these pieces are securely tethered to the material difficulties of being a human in today's world, where a child must participate in a lockdown drill at his preschool and a dying woman turns to Reddit to fund her efforts to be cryogenetically preserved. Conversations between the speaker and her children trace the beauty and terror of existential indeterminacy: "We begin to consider other planets — / Will they have us?" In a long piece titled "Book of Revelation," the speaker dreams that "below the bed / is an encyclopedia of lost things," a phrase that captures the collection's wide range and its categorizing eye. Powell turns to astronomy, Alice in Wonderland, Millerism, and culinary cruelty, with a uniquely celebratory and elegiac voice, all in an effort to understand the depths, and effects, of the human appetite for pleasure, power, and escape.