Charity Ketz
The boy at the plow knows the word
                    that opens through all its frame, the seed

                    now left and lodged in broken rows
of old success gone lovely—

that place for cranes to nest and feed by pools reflecting
                    blue and stubble turned under

some blade-wrenched root. Now
                    crows come, and now the cold

spreads around its presence too, lays out its feathery
                    sheet and holds. The seed explodes

                    at the appointed time, which comes, perhaps

to cold-worked dirt
                    that would inert its threadlike

                    seeking for depths to raise
and lose its flag of self

in season. He's young and goes out singing. Goes out
                    cursing, for many things

don't seem altogether
                    impossible, though

the hush light, the acrid swallow, the smaller ills
                    and dim triumph, yes,

he enjoys. Still the blue sky widens out and out,
                    and he hears

his heart, quiet as a pebble, or struggled
                    on its line. In the neighbor's den,

he tells friends that sex should be
                    accompanied by

the gift of the life, the marriage. Some will
                    snort and pass him a beer, some

girls move close because they want
                    to touch his hair. Here it is, some

version of the life, caught in its going
                    around the room.

Or he bears the thing, shrugs them
                    off and smiles staring down

as though this field will show blue
                    too when its furrows mud and thaw.

Year by year, to someone it seems, one sows,
                    another rips away,

the very fiber and warm spine of the thing—

To another, there's more
                    left in the hand like

a word, however moving under skies it's heard.
from the journal THE CAROLINA QUARTERLY
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My poem "[pastoral for the aughts]" is one of a growing collection that attends to the voices and postures of those around me (farmers, academics, Amish, Central Pennsylvanians, an extended family of blue-collar workers) engaged in the common struggle against insignificance.
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Cover image of Richard Zenith's "Pessoa"
Richard Zenith’s Pessoa Biography

"Mammoth, definitive and sublime, Richard Zenith’s new biography, ‘Pessoa,’ gives us a group portrait of the writer and his cast of alternate selves—along with a perceptive reading of what it meant for Pessoa to multiply (or did he fracture?) like this."

via THE NEW YORK TIMES
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Front cover of Joanna Klink's "The Nightfields"
What Sparks Poetry:
Maud Casey on Joanna Klink’s The Nightfields

"I read from The Nightfields most mornings for the vertiginous pleasure of scale, for the sense of intimacy and infinitude, in order to feel my insignificance in the world. Our relative insignificance, our like-it-or-not interconnectedness, Klink reminds us, is not such a bad thing to feel."
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