Peter Cook and Kenny Lerner
Translated from the American Sign Language by John Lee Clark
Need, frantic need, eagle-taloned need
is a pumping drill. The oil sloshes
to the brim. The lid slams and it's a tanker
spewing smoke. It burps and hisses
into a truck. It barrels through highways. It pours
down underground. It's a gas pump and a car
and a stop and a refill and a continuing.
It pulls over at the side of a tall tree.
It chops and strips and grinds and pounds
until dead fish float downstream
and our need is a single sheet of paper
sliding into a typewriter. It folds and licks
and places three stamps and sends on beating wings
to a door somewhere. A man reads it and fastens
his chin strap, carrying a rifle as bodies
fall and things go up in flames. It finds him
and the coffin lid closes. As soon as it stakes
a cross in salute, the crush comes
squeezing the soil for more. Oh yes,
we need so very much.
from the book HOW TO COMMUNICATE / W. W. Norton & Company
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To celebrate National Poetry Month, and 25+ years of Poetry Daily, we are launching our official merchandise store with two inaugural items: an evergreen Poetry Daily logo tote, featuring a line from Diane Seuss' poem, "Romantic Poet," and a companion black tote, featuring a specially commissioned illustration.
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Fady Joudah [...] book cover
"The 'Unfinished Business' and Enduring Vision of Fady Joudah’s […]"

"Throughout time—first as an oral tradition—poets have captured what cannot be fully expressed in prose, in ways that comfort, reveal, spark action, and ultimately, bring us into community, which is the only hope civilizations have. The work in […] succeeds as remarkable poetry, and it also tasks readers to remember what ground it arises from: shattered, sorrowful, and sacred"

via CHICAGO REVIEW OF BOOKS
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What Sparks Poetry:
Jody Gladding on [she is one who looks]

"Released from the bubble of voice, narrative, and image, words animate space differently—the degraded 'open space,' the space of the poem. They inhabit it, root, and evolve there. Perhaps they have always done so, they just needed to be freed from lineation and author/ity to make that clear. These are not my own words. They refuse ownership. You can read them any way you like."
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