Poetry
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“Waxwings” by Daniel Nathan Terry
Daniel Nathan Terry’s second collection of verse, Waxwings, opens with “Scarecrow,” an address to the poem’s namesake from its creator: “Scare-crow crafter, burlap-tailor, / black-eye smudger, when I’m done, / crows mistake you for a man.” By the end of…
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“Book of Dog” by Cleopatra Mathis
The domesticated dog, evolved 15,000 years ago from gray wolves, is not a reliquary of slavish dependence in Book of Dog, Cleopatra Mathis’ seventh collection, nor is it a token of the bourgeois middle-class’s presumed benignity. It is as necessary…
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“Melancholia (An Essay)” by Kristina Marie Darling
Kristina Marie Darling’s wonderful new book of poems, Melancholia (An Essay)—her fourth—is more than a collection of abandoned footnotes and glossaries (poetic constructs she has been mastering since Night Songs), it is a history composed entirely of an ex-lover’s curios—a…
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The Last Poem I Loved: “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver
After I finished reading “Wild Geese,” all I could think of was: So what! So what that I am an undocumented person living in hiding, so what that I was turned into a “criminal” when I was a child, so…
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Is Franz Wright the Rush Limbaugh of American Poetry?
I had intended this week to write about gratitude. To express my thanks to all the new readers of Poetry Wire and The Rumpus and to wish you all a pleasant Thanksgiving. I wanted to say something about the necessity…
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“I Growed No Potatoes To Write About, Sir”: a Rumpus Original Poem by Erin Belieu
I Growed No Potatoes To Write About, Sir nor bogs, nor fathers, nor special water that was my place alone to make me hard and wise— I did not sow nor bury, nor even try to fudge my nothings in…
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“Baltics” by Tomas Tranströmer
Tomas Tranströmer’s Baltics, a long poem, first appeared in 1974, but this time around Samuel Charters has added a new afterword to his original translation, and his wife Ann Charters has included photographs from 1973 of Tranströmer and his wife at…
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The Last Book I Loved: “Please” by Jericho Brown
Jericho Brown’s Please explores the way love and violence coexist with each other and how the two sometimes intertwine. The collection of poems is categorized by four sections: “Repeat,” “Pause,” “Power,” and finally, “Stop”; the first three sections address self-identification…
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: The Love Poems of David Petraeus
Poetry Wire has learned of the existence of secret love poems by former CIA director David Petraeus.
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“The Apothecary’s Heir” by Julianne Buchsbaum
A winning selection in the 2011 National Poetry Series, Julianne Buchsbaum’s The Apothecary’s Heir interrogates the wildness of nature, the decadence of urban sprawl, and the necessity of myth and history in our daily lives. While her third collection maintains…
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“As Long As Trees Last” by Hoa Nguyen
Seattle’s renowned independent press, Wave Books, recently published Hoa Nguyen’s third full-length collection of poems, As Long As Trees Last. In it, Nguyen once again dares to experiment with form, structure, and language to bring us a collection of genuinely…
