Plaintive slaps, almost tabla-like, of paper on wall, And the creaks and fluttering when the latter curves, Its slim body, that pulls me into the sea of sleep. For I know that, even if I do trespass into the dominion Of heaven when my eyes are closed, the calendar will continue Danc...
/ but it doesn’t suck / it doesn’t pretend to get on its knees and make the rafters sing / it is a red owl on a bicycle with hungry eyes / “Who isn’t bruised around the edges, peaches poured into the truck bed, receipts faded to white?” ...
Shippy’s petit love poem, au contraire, is as complicated as it is delicate. Are the lover’s face and her eyes “perfect / [f]or” him, but more so as deletions occur? The poem benefits from the page: perfect for a letterpress broadside or else lit –“from within”...
Their work opened a route into the literary ghazal tradition for me, leading to and through Hafez, Ghalib, Hassan, and Iqbal, and then grappling with ghazal in English, including Aga Shahid Ali’s poems and his sometimes-uncompromising stance on translating the ghazal’s formal properties. The...
This book is a homage, a requiem, an appeal, but above all, a tender and compelling invitation to strangeness – and deeper listening. In witnessing ‘the magisterial stillness of the barracuda’ and the many eyes that look at you looking at them in ‘a deep Rothko-blue sea’, it become...
A woman saysIistenand covers her eyes with her hands. photo ©Reuben Radding poem byJennifer Michael Hecht from The Next Ancient World (Tupelo, 2001); first published in Poetry (2000). http://amzn.com/0971031002 Posted byJennifer Michael Hechton May 20, 2016 at 08:10 PM inJennifer Mich...