Smoke Drifts contains both free verse and poems that follow a formal architecture, including several of Anjuman’s ghazals, a centuries-old tradition that Uzbek writer Hamid Ismailov describes as “a universal poetic form,” like the European sonnet, found in literary cultures from Turkey to India.
(reviews)
Newspapers make the best
umbrellas, the rain erases
them. Fascinating philosophies
in my head-hunch over litter,
digging for shit
when there is already so much
on the surface.
(poetry)
but how do you explain a marathon
to those who’ve never run it?
(poetry/translations)
Ahmed carefully layers Nigerian cultural practices into the poem’s emotional architecture. “Where I come from, silence is how you mourn a man without gray hairs”—the line invokes a northern Nigerian Muslim sensibility. It also hints at the Nigerian pattern of losing young men to violence, religious conflict, insurgency, and conscription.
(reviews)
We seven spent most of our days preparing ourselves for the war that we were sure we would soon see. Broomsticks became rifles and stones became grenades and we practiced clearing rooms of imagined enemies in the sanatorium.
(nonfiction/Ukraine)
My first uprooting took place in 1998. It was autumn in Jamaica, and putting those words together in a sentence feels as strange as I felt when I lived there. When I was six years old, my parents pulled my younger brother and me from the suburban township of Maplewood, New Jersey and relocated us to the coastal city of Kingston, Jamaica.
(nonfiction)
father’s Chevy
station
wagon nostalgia
weekend I am
always in
service to
my failed
marriage’s cream-
colored
cashmere
sweater
(poetry)
Brian Strang combines visual and auditory components to his poem “Songbirds.”
(audiovisual)
Sears Tower stands fast and solidly flies. Over its base no statues try to beautify the essence of its vim: a skeletal trajectory, a bold learp of blackest metal/glass reaching, soaring higher and higher
(poetry)
Daniel Rachel frames an argument about how spectacle can override ideology and historical awareness. In doing so, these examples endorsed showbiz over ideology, but what else is new? There has never been an entertainer who didn’t want to mesmerize.
(reviews)
