The Last Poem I Loved: “Insomnia” by Elizabeth Bishop
It is near the time of my college graduation. I’m graduating early, barely 20 years old. Among my friends, the stuff of my romantic self-sabotage is legendary.
Poetry
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Reluctant Mistress by Anne Champion
Anne Champion’s dazzling first book of poetry, Reluctant Mistress, offers readers a thought-provoking revision of the love lyric, rendering this rich literary tradition relevant to a postmodern cultural landscape. While…
Things I Say to Pirates on Nights When I Miss You by Keely Hyslop
Pirates plunder. Pirates navigate by wit and savvy and force. They intercept us somewhere between where we were and where we think we are going to end up. They are…
David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: The Genius of Adrienne Rich
I’m surprised by the amiable but lukewarm reception Ange Mlinko gives in The Nation to Adrienne Rich’s Later Poems: Selected and New. The 500+ retrospective was published late last year.…
Dark Elderberry Branch: Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva
Dark Elderberry Branch is a collaboration between two living poets and one who is dead but fully present. Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa (former Soviet Union, in the Ukraine),…
Messages by Piotr Gwiazda
When I was young and soft and I couldn’t fall asleep at night, I’d just lie there in bed, swallowing lumps of dread whose shape and taste I had no…
Inside/Out: Selected Poems by Marilyn Buck
Every prison sentence represents compound tragedies involving family members and friends, the affect on the community where the crime was committed, and, of course, the prisoner whose sentence may or…
David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: My Kingdom for a Bag of Bones
Up most all of last night with some kind of malady contaminated by insomnia, my mind began to drift as a means to stem the anguish. What follows, fair warning,…
Notturno by Gabriele D’Annunzio
Gabriele D’Annunzio wrote Notturno on strips of paper big enough for just one line a piece, while his eyes were bandaged into near blindness, as he convalesced for over two…
Butch Geography by Stacey Waite
Of all the stunning epigraphs Stacey Waite includes in Butch Geography—insights from William Carlos Williams and Judith Butler and Virginia Woolf—the most memorable and significant to me is the Japanese…
Murder Ballad by Jane Springer
Because a book of poetry can do anything, I am going to propose that Jane Springer’s Murder Ballad open a hole in the Mississippi River. An impossible hole. Because the…
Orphan Hours by Stanley Plumly
Like a blue jay, thrush, or white-chested robin, darting in last light into leaves, twigs, or sky – after the rain, say, but before evening falls, when dark follows a…