Excerpts
Fragment: After Ida
In the black and white Polish filmin which the beautiful localplays the nun. In Warsaw,she meets her aunt, once powerful,now alcoholic, who directs her to hertrue past. I am struggling with understandingunsure which past is mine.In the film in the scenewhere the actress wears her deadaunt’s dresses and heelsafter the aunt has killed herself.I am …
Sublime Physick by Patrick Madden, University of Nebraska Press.
In just one page of one essay in Patrick Madden’s new collection Sublime Physick, the author chisels away at a block quote of Nietzsche, lines from Dante as translated by Longfellow, a verse from the Psalms, and a remark from Solon, the Greek reformer who reprimands Croesus in book one of Herodotus’s Histories. A few …
Anodyne
I Just north of Ward, South Carolina,the pong of the paper mill writhesthe air southward, across the orchards, all the wayto Johnston,where creeks coil through their motions;small seeps carry through ditchesto and from my father’s pond, where catfish rippleacross the bottom, stir updelicate skeletons of their forebears. A stray dog,wolflike, with a snout long and …
Corzo
One day when I was in the seventh grade, I came home to my father—Eduvigo Herrera III—cutting his heart out with a steak knife. He was sitting at the little kitchen table when I got home from school, his hand in a ragged chest wound the size of a plum. "Mija, I need you to …
Lion
When the old man died, I laid him out in the bathtub because he was small and neatly fit. I took him by the ankles first and then, moving slowly toward his neck, gently scrubbed him down. I lifted him at the back and washed his ribs all the way around until he was like …
Miss Saigon
My mother was Miss Saigon of 1973, two years before the fall and capture of the city by the People’s Army of Vietnam and the Viêt Công. There is a solid silver trophy, its height the length of my torso. The cup itself is the circumference of a basketball, and its S-shaped handles are molded …
Emergency Brake by Ruth Madievsky, Tavern Books, 2016.
Lungs, throats, doors: these images recur throughout Emergency Brake, the debut collection from poet Ruth Madievsky. Each names a portal, an opening where smoke or speech or someone may pass between inside and outside. "I think the body is a door," muses one poem’s speaker. Emergency Brake makes brilliant use of this insight, that to …
Comptrollers
Morning after the twentieth anniversary of environemental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa's murder Did you just say why do the heathens rage? My head is a woven reed of traffic lawsbut my legs on the pedals seem to be sayingtoday is not the day. Perched as I am on this wheel, slantingthrough the streets like a swift …
Tyehimba Jess. Olio. Wave Books.
Tyehimba Jess’s 2016 Olio is mammoth. Comprised of letters, interviews, sketches, architectural and mathematical poems, "Jubilees," songs, conversations, and formal poems, and accompanied by a playlist of musicians, Jess’s second offering introduces us to (reminds us of) thirteen "first-generation-freed voices" plus the Fisk Jubilee Singers, all of whom "coalesce in counterpoint, name nemeses, summon tongue …