Out on the lawn,
the party has gone
on since long
before anyone
remembers. The silk
suits, black ties,
the satin evening
gowns have all grown
weary of the party
lights that, woven
through deck railing,
begin to falter
flickering off
and on in a little
cat and mouse
game between house
and night that night,
driven back each time
a little less,
is winning. In-
seam and pleat,

sleeve, yoke, slit
placket and vent
are sick of the damp
shapes they wear,
the suave rustling
that blunt bodies
ape over
the darkening lawn—
even the laciest, the
light as fragrance,
sheer as air, is
dreaming now
only of wire
hangers pinging
in empty closets
under basement stairs—
and as they dream they sag
to the tips of grass
that curl like tongues
under hem
and cuff to lick
them as they pass.
from the book BY AND BY / The Waywiser Press
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Cover of Public Abstract
On Jane Huffman's Public Abstract

"Fear, illness, reticence, love, grief, uncertainty—Couldn't this be the abstracted story of most lives? In Huffman's hands, however, these familiar feelings become a web of language that lulls the reader into a type of hypnotic state, one full of music and emotion and, yes, beauty. Huffman is a poet with a distinctive voice that can carry the weight of its ancestry and create something completely new and surprising."

via RHINO
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What Sparks Poetry:
Nathan Spoon on Language as Form


"'I Have a Vision for My Poems' belongs to a series of Sylvia Plath found poems Nazifa Islam is writing 'to dissect, examine, and explore the bipolar experience.' The poem exemplifies how Islam is using this series to openly connect with a disabled ancestor, which is important because, while various cognitive disabilities have probably existed as long as humans have, the language to frame and see them as distinct embodiments and identities has not."
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