What Sparks Poetry:
Diane Seuss on Reading Prose
"Keats’s ballad opens with three stanzas in the voice of a questioner, after which the knight-at-arms takes over, answering the questioner through storytelling. Likewise, set at the center of Lorca’s poem is a dialogue between the older and younger man. As the green girl teeters on the balcony, suspended between dream and reality, life and death, so Keats’s knight occupies the in-between, stranded by the faery 'On the cold hill’s side.' And each poem, in its way, serves as an allegory for the container itself, the ballad form, which inhabits the liminal space between narrative and lyric, story and song." |
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Marcus Iwama On Brandon Shimoda’s Hydra Medusa
"As a hybrid Japanese-American text, Brandon Shimoda’s Hydra Medusa lives in this same strange light. It reads like a diary under the sun, bleeding into itself, full of holes and riddled by slippage. Poems become prose, become dreams, become memories, become the waking life pressed between your teeth. Each page is a welter of color and shadow. In simpler terms, Hydra Medusa is haunted."
viaCLEVELAND REVIEW OF BOOKS |
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