In the Quran there is a story about the people of Sodom from the city of Lut who were stoned to death for homosexuality. Often, choosing your life is the scariest thing to do. At a dance party I met another Queer Pakistani for the first time as it began to pour rain, not stones. As I danced with my lover, I knew this pleasure could never be a coincidence.
Diya Abbas on "Dead Sea Dance for Sodom" |
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James Chung McKenna Interviews Daniel Borzutsky
"I started this new book as an attempt to answer that question: how do you quantify the murmuring grief of the Americas? I’m not trying to statistically analyze anything, but I feel like the collection, to the extent that it is an 'extension,' is thinking about the possible ways in which grief manifests, is quantified, and interferes with or coincides with bureaucratic and administrative state structures."
via TRIQUARTERLY |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Robert Pinsky on David Ferry's "Johnson on Pope"
"Tell all the truth but tell it slant—. The moment I begin saying to myself Emily Dickinson’s first line, my tongue flicks rapidly to the roof of my mouth for the first sound in the first word “Tell.” The same exact little movement happens at the end of the line’s last word, “slant.” In this pre-industrial, bodily way the reader becomes the poet’s instrument. In a way, it is as though they were one. But in another way, the bodily nature of the line enacts the double solitude: the reader’s body absolutely itself, utterly separate from the equally solitary poet who made the line: solitaria. Ferry’s poem is about the empathic loneliness Johnson’s prose suggests but cannot embody." |
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