This is the first poem from my chapbook, "Flat-Pack," which won the DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press chapbook contest in 2021. I began this project when I re-read the introduction to Zadie Smith's book of essays, "Intimations", in which she writes: "Early on in the crisis, I picked up Marcus Aurelius and for the first time in my life read his "Meditations" not as an academic exercise, nor in the pursuit of pleasure, but with the same attitude I bring to the instructions for a flat-pack table—I was in need of practical assistance." I decided to make this sentence a writing prompt and endeavored to create a set of impossible instructions for an impossible time. The words are cut from random pages of "Meditations." The images are made through analog collage of IKEA assembly instruction manuals (almost all from flat-pack tables, aside from one piece of a flat-pack bed frame—this was the very first one I made and it hadn't yet occurred to me that, of course, all the images must be from tables). As I worked, I held in mind the mood of the early pandemic.
Anney Bogliano on "How Clear the Cut" |
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"K-Ming Chang’s Search for the Truth"
"A touchstone story throughout her childhood was the tale of Hu Gū Pó, a tiger spirit from Taiwanese folklore who wished to live inside the body of a woman. Each time the young Chang pestered her mother to tell her the story, the details would shift like sand, teaching her from an early age that stories themselves can be living beasts."
via THE GUARDIAN |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Donald Revell on James Longenbach's Forever
"To read the poems gathered as Forever is to walk beside Jim Longenbach along the banks of Lethe. We know the place, having been here before, with Dante in the most beautiful cantos of his Purgatorio. We remember its perils—the perils of oblivion and forgetfulness. And we remember its allures—the garden on the farther shore and a reunion there with the unforgettable. But something has changed. Somehow, Longenbach has prepared an estate for us along the water’s edge." |
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