Scattered through my new book, "Midwood," are twenty-four numbered poems. Many of them try to take apart and understand this Whitmanesque phrase "Out of the…," and most were written on my fire escape, overlooking a wooded ravine, during the first year of the pandemic. There was some unnamable quality I was trying to get to the bottom of—something residing, it seemed, in the ravine—and each "Midwood" poem became a kind of soliloquy on this, with the trees as listeners.
Jana Prikryl on "Midwood 8" |
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"Auden was More Than a Great Poet"
"Appropriately, in 'The Cave of Making'—also from About the House—Auden lovingly describes his dictionaries as 'the very best money can buy' and stresses that the windows of his study in Austria admit 'a light one could mend a watch by.' Here, he concludes, 'silence is turned into objects.' Need one add that those objects, wherever they were handcrafted, stand high among the best and most enjoyable poems of the 20th century?"
via THE WASHINGTON POST |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Felicia Zamora on Threa Almontaser's The Wild Fox of Yemen
"I keep returning to 'Heritage Emissary.' The work of this poem cores me. The couplets mimic tensions throughout the entire book with the push/pull of play and intense difficulty juxtaposed. The pluralities of being for multilingual individuals become verb—as in 'When I Arabic my way/ towards them'—and we continue to see the stitch/wound paradox for the voice in, 'I long to play a song that doesn't terrorize,/ a song that's understood.'" |
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