This poem is one of the oldest in my book, and one of the first poems I wrote that made me feel like I was coming into my "voice." The book focuses largely on gender and power, and specifically the ways in which queer children learn the postures of hiding. My mother told me this story when I was younger, and it didn't leave me. This poem is in my full-length book, "Beforelight," which came out with BOA earlier this year.
Matthew Gellman on "Mother, Sleeveless" |
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"How Sappho’s Poetry Paved the Way for Modern Queer Literature"
"Sappho composed in a variety of styles, leaping effortlessly between epigrams, funeral dirges, wedding hymns, epic-like pieces and romantic verses, many of them inspired by the enigma of women she admired. She invented her own poetic form, the Sapphic Stanza, a light but penetrating triplet of eleven-syllable lines rounded off by a final five-syllable flourish. And like the Homeric bards, she performed her verses to a melody, holding in her hands a lyre constructed from a tortoise shell with seven strings derived from the intestines of a sheep."
via LITHUB |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Brian Teare on Taylor Johnson’s Inheritance
"Maybe you already know inheritance is vexed by paradox. Boon or burden, boon and burden? Each of us enters Johnson’s book through that singular, seemingly never settled and always unsettling noun, holding a small flat object labeled Inheritance. A thing made and possessed by another, and now—is it really yours? A thing given, but was it freely chosen? 'Extraordinary limitation,' Johnson writes, 'playing freedom.'" |
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