Excerpts
Prelude to Bruise by Saeed Jones
Saeed Jones. Prelude to Bruise. Coffee House Press. Saeed Jones’s first full-length book, Prelude to Bruise, is a necessary piece of contemporary poetry that bravely tackles issues such as abuse, promiscuity, homosexuality, and racism. Though the title hints at an agonizing inevitability, the collection implies that a bruise may, in fact, denote healthy progress. Jones’s …
The Night We’re Not Sleeping In by Sean Bishop
Sean Bishop. The Night We’re Not Sleeping In. Sarabande Books. Sean Bishop’s debut collection, The Night We’re Not Sleeping In, begins as a musical contract: “The signed agrees to breath, to the lungs’ soggy bellows” (“Terms of Service”). It quickly becomes clear that, for the speaker, the bargain we’ve struck is about waking to the …
It Will End with Us by Sam Savage
Sam Savage. It Will End with Us. Coffee House Press. Sam Savage’s latest novel, It Will End with Us, reads as part narrative and part philosophical meditation on memory and language. The novel’s first-person narrator, Eve, is haunted by the singular childhood event of her mother’s disintegrating sanity. Eve is an elderly woman, living with …
Dove
bichwa ke mare ordhniya ke torde,tohar najariya jaherile jaherile. A scorpion stings me, its toxins swim my veins,one ill prick from you and I writhe in your fever. I dream I cough up a songbird I release to the sky,you board a plane to take you across the desert. I will tie messages to the …
Prayer Book for Vanishing
Anything black nuh good.Jamaican Patois Maxim White mirror of morning,the body is yours. Yours the faceto anoint with Epsom salts, clean teaspoon of bleachaside in the decanter.What holy water. Approach the angelsto efface this blackness,another tar baby, self I am scorching. In the nightfind nothing but a dagger of teeth.Pitch-black marrow, vile pigment unwanted,set fire …
A Mother Near the West Virginia Line Considers Public Health
The industry thinks I’m too dumb to back down; they don’t knowI do this for my mom and dad. They were 69 and 71. He had pulmonary fibrosis, worked with asbestos all his life. She grew upnear the coke ovens back when kids were sent into the mines to pick coal. So they both had …
Poem against Selfies
But I have so much to say! For instance, did you realizethat insects are the most diverse group of organismson the entire planet, representing approximately80% of the world’s species?That at any given timethere are an estimated 10 quintillion(10,000,000,000,000,000,000)individual insects alive,that the number of (living and dead) species of insectsis said to be, at a minimum,30 …
Shattering
The man becomes a dolphin in her dreams. Only briefly, he is a shining silver arc above her, and then, when his hips push down between her legs he’s a man again. The air is bright around him. His shoulders are rounded, his eyes closed, his mouth is open, gasping. She had thought he looked …
Coming To: A Lexicology of Fainting
1. vein From Old French veine, from Latin vena. The earliest senses were blood vessel and small natural underground channel of water. See also: blood, artery, channel, the channeling of the dead. It’s a wake, we are told, my cousin and I, but we hear it like one word: awake. Who is doing the waking? …