Stephanie Cawley

It wasn't abstract but actual fact of morning gray clouds flattened above everything. I was a song that nobody listened to anymore but a faint curl of smoke remembered my name. I wanted somewhere for my anger to go but it blew back in my face, seeds in a wind, a caul. It had become more coherent than I expected, a set of preferences that stick like a nametag stitched to my chest. I wanted to live as intensely as possible at the edge of becoming, refuse to say what I was or who I had been. I drowned so many women in the lake. Their bones kept washing up on shore and I assembled them into new animals. This was called the production of knowledge. I was called mother, or language.

from the journal WEST BRANCH
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"Ed Roberson Wins Jackson Poetry Prize"

"Ed Roberson is the recipient of the 2020 Jackson Poetry Prize. The prize is awarded annually by Poets & Writers to an American poet of exceptional talent. Endowed by John and Susan Jackson, the prize carries a monetary award of $70,000 and aims to provide what poets need: time and encouragement to write."
 
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Cover of the book, The Poems of Paul Celan, translated by Michael Hamburger
What Sparks Poetry:
Gillian Parrish on Paul Celan's "In the Daytime"

"This poem also expands my view of poem-making as a practice of attention to include poem as communion, as something more like prayer. Clearly, Celan’s poem is a poem of attention. Better yet, it is a poem that attends without wanting, that rests in a ready waiting-that-is-not-waiting. For only in such an open space can wildness arrive and minds meet."
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