“Escape From the Filth Room” is both dreamlike and nightmarish, blurring images of consuming insects and slurping ooze with a vision of God. Particularly arresting moments come in the second and third stanzas’ turns, where the direct address calls readers…
Making the mundane suddenly surreal, Caleb Wolfson-Seeley links seemingly disparate moments, from a cat’s skeleton to burnt toast, in “And the tulips didn’t bloom this year.” Each stanza makes those links linguistically literal through the beginning “and” — a conjunction…
Ziyuan Tang attempts some pretty ambitious maneuvers in “To My Very Catholic Father.” Most poems about poems can stray toward the pedantic or else they’re academic, self-referential, and stodgy, but Tang is neither; the meticulous repetition and slick wordplay sometimes…
This month’s “In Retrospect” interview is with poet María Auxiliadora Álvarez. In this series, we ask renowned poets to look back over their poems and collections, mapping out their poetic processes. From her early writing to her most recent collection,…
We have a new “In Retrospect” interview with poet D.M. Aderibigbe for our series which asks renowned poets to look back over their poems and collections, mapping out their poetic processes. From his early writing to his most recent collection,…
Robison’s “Meadow, Early Dark” unfolds the way all great poems do, reminiscent of poems like Jackson Holbert’s “Unsent Letter to Jakob,” or much of Good Grief, The Ground by Margaret Ray. There’s a billowing outward, the way you would shake out a…
There’s a intriguing and appealing rhythm to the word association that guides Seif-Eldeine’s “Subconscious Sonnet 113.” Sometimes the shifts make sense and the direct rhyme is clear, with the kind of connection that can instantly appear in your head. The…
“In Retrospect” is our interview series which asks renowned poets to look back over their poems and collections, mapping out their poetic processes. From their early writing to their most recent collection, we’re looking to hear about core poems and…
Anna Gasaway is clearly exasperated and frustrated with the dynamic she presents in this poem; the brilliance is in the accessibility of the examples she provides. Since a wide audience can have a varied level of exposure to all kinds…
Sebastian Bronson Boddie’s poem takes many surprising directions, and just when you expect them to go left, they go right. They are unpredictable, and it’s almost impossible to understand how they find the associations they do. It’s clear that there…
