The title comes from Margaret Atwood’s poem “You Fit Into Me,” a borrowed line that helps Gaudry translate her own feelings. The phrase “fit into me” can act as both a plea and a demand, asking us to place ourselves inside the characters—but borrowed language can also act like a mirror, reflecting our own experiences back at us rather than revealing hers.
(reviews)
this sharpness
of ritual burns
toward expiation, but
the body kindles
(poetry)
That which presents itself
startling you
when you least expect it
must have the practised agility
of that which does not present itself
when it is expected.
(poetry/translations)
So the day begins:
searchlight; flesh cannot repel
it, drinks; partakes; that
never hurt before.
So the day begins
with Big Bang light; no way to
penetrate its skin.
No tool can pierce it.
(poetry/translations)
Look! Look! Look! The dance
of these albatrosses in a sea, heaviness
like the iceberg of a frozen era!
(poetry)
The boy in the black carriage listens.
Solo in flight the starlings have no message.
They fly. He listens.
(poetry)
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new and recent books:
Every night I read
My country’s history
of profit wrung from working people
and before dawn I burn my shoes
Can violence be made into beauty? Can beauty be used to dignify the stain of violence? Sloan seems to suggest so, perhaps, by conceiving of Ophelia’s body as part of nature—indistinguishable from it.
(reviews)
This week, ACM is posting poetry every weekday.
wait, things improve, around every corner is a prize.
Let’s go back to that track and crush pine needles
with our heels. Crush our watches too.
(poetry)
This week, ACM is posting poetry every weekday.
we’d just torn out not the eyes but the reflection in the eyes
while culture hanging on the media’s fangs was dying there
no more tongue-in-cheek now and above the vulgarity of
doing cartwheels thinking thus to prove its legitimacy
doesn’t the assassin push forward by brandishing his knife
(poetry/translations)
This week, ACM is posting poetry every weekday.
See? I’ve been frank, while the TV keeps beaming images–you yelling at the cop dragging you away: Don’t take me away yet; but the cops keep manhandling you, smash your spectacles, your black skin shines with sweat.
(poetry)
This week, ACM is posting poetry every weekday.
And they continued with more world history examples
where a victim lived happily ever after next to her executioner,
having forgiven and forgotten.
(poetry/translations)
This week, ACM is posting poetry every weekday.
I’d tell you to be careful, that everything here is lousy with history, from the first megafaunal
extinctions to those buffalo carcasses rotting in heaps after the last of our Transcontinental
massacres.
(poetry)
Shiki wrote haiku—tens of thousands of haiku—elevating himself to the immortal ranks of Bashō, Issa, and his personal hero, Buson. However, Shiki did not want to go back to the past and its masters; he wanted to reinvent what he believed was a dying art.
(reviews)
Kateri Menominee is the ninth and final Native voice we are publishing in our series collected by Mark Turcotte.
You watch your aunt unbutton a rabbit carcass
and you feel the vocal folds of your dark throat
contract descend a dark ache in your belly
to swallow a language ripped from another
(poetry)
The book, at its core, follows the speaker’s daily journeys along a rugged mountain road over the course of a year, with the gravel thoroughfare and its environs serving much the way Thoreau’s Walden Pond once did— fueling reflections on humanity in general, and the present moment more specifically.
(reviews)
Part of a series of Native poetry collected by Mark Turcotte.
Springtime is for the seeds and letting light into the home our spirits live in. We prep the soil for the ones who sleep there. Summer picks berries for playtime.
(poetry)
This week, ACM is posting poetry every weekday.
even baby’s breath is weary and stale
in their nostrils falls the hail
the country’s black men sent to jail
(poetry)
This week, ACM is posting poetry every weekday.
You are forced to think very formally, very
philosophically, Someday a siren will come for you,
and you hold your breath, rub your eyes, roll
with a groan to flick on the late Late Late Show.
(poetry)
This week, ACM is posting poetry every weekday.
One guy said I looked like Queen Elizabeth in it,
so I wore it everywhere, led entrances
with hip swishes and a smirk,
blasted “Flagpole Sitta” in my headphones
because it was my baddie girl-esque era.
(poetry)
This week, ACM is posting poetry every weekday.
Despite what you may think,
I am comfortably phallic.
I wonder if your punchline
can live for two hundred years,
burrowing through human muck
and blood and flushed tissues.
(poetry)
This week, ACM is posting poetry every weekday. This is the first.
through my brother’s bedroom door, the expectations of manhood
complete: apology, sincerity, apology—take it and move on.
In my bedroom alone, shaking, I have prayed the old prayers too.
(poetry)
Part of a series of Native poetry collected by Mark Turcotte.
did you know trees grieve one another?
i wonder how long they hold grief in their bodies
i wonder how grief sticks in tree ring?
(poetry)
Part of a series of Native poetry collected by Mark Turcotte.
Your kitchen is transfigured, is wild rice soup and Lil Nas X
Your porch, a portal, re-applying lipstick
between each press to cigarette filters, to skin,
to handcheekforeheadjaw, to make sure you leave marks
(poetry)
And mirrored in the dilated,
upturned eyes, can you, she asks, see a room’s
bright window, panes of light. And can you see
how the selfsame light pours into us,
the shine of attention, of tenderness.
(poetry)
She used to talk nonstop, now she calls so little, asking strange questions. One time she asked him about that Wednesday morning in 1976. He was just fifteen then. She wasn’t even born yet! Crazy girl, cried over dead communists. What has she been doing in America? Countries kill their people all the time.
(poetry/No Place is Foreign)
Part of a series of Native poetry collected by Mark Turcotte.
I sat at his grave,
rearranging ever-present anger and decades old resentments into
drunken one night
stands, warring
with abstract and weak forgiveness.
(poetry)
This week, ACM is posting book reviews every weekday.
The book, at its core, follows the speaker’s daily journeys along a rugged mountain road over the course of a year, with the gravel thoroughfare and its environs serving much the way Thoreau’s Walden Pond once did— fueling reflections on humanity in general, and the present moment more specifically.
(reviews)
This week, ACM is posting book reviews every weekday.
Supposing there was any lingering hope that the modal interventions of capitalism might deliver us, as a whole, into a brighter, more sustainable future, well, Gilbert’s poems are here to announce the ethical insolvency of that hope—or, not only are we totally, irrevocably fucked, but the severe degree to which we are fucked has already reshaped our ecology, our futurity, our reality.
(reviews)
This week, ACM is posting book reviews every weekday.
Catrileo’s florid, visceral writing traverses the centuries—from the so-called Conquista, Spanish term for the brutal colonization of the Americas, to the modern-day capital city. It is a lyrical and nonlinear chronicle that spans the arrival of invaders armed with “old maps” and “steel fire” to urban streets studded with bars and patrolled by police known for their brutality.
(reviews)
Another Chicago Magazine 