The government, monet notes, will try to spin a different narrative—that of the domestic terrorist, the outside agitator, the paid protestor. That’s why it’s important to write and share, to maintain the presence and livelihood of resistance.
(reviews)
How does one write about the very things that defy language—things like loss, sorrow, not to mention potential words from the past that went unsaid? How does one convey language-defiant notions through language? For Heller, such linguistically impossible truths are conveyed with metaphor and story, but also with silences, approximations, and fragments.
(reviews)
I went to the lakefront at sunrise, but the beach and
sky were empty, and my dear friend
was not there.
(poetry/Palestinian Voices)
in my city, two fallen en route
to a market, eight more
at an intersection
of a hospital, ice
in their cheeks, hair, lips as if
they said goodbye
(poetry)
One of the famous Iranian rug patterns is the Tree of Life, in which the tree is often located on the vertical symmetry line of the carpet. The tree symbolizes the connection of earthly beings to the heavens.
(poetry)
I WhatsApp my cousin on his jubilee. He was born the day after the Yom Kippur War started, and here again: rockets, hostages, my aunt fainting. Can we celebrate anything without a backdrop of mourning, or—unlike the other day in Ukraine—even mourn, not adding at the memorial half a village to the slain?
(Ukraine)
In both concept and practice, we ask a great deal of the field, making it an adaptable metaphor in poetry and art: the open field, the blank page, the blank canvas. The field suggests potential, something unspoiled and limitless where growth is inevitable.
(reviews)
The poems conjure historical and essential artifacts, from “Before Refrigeration” to “Beckoning DigiSex,” and people, too, such as Darwin walking on mountains above the sea, and the poet’s grandmother, whose life “began in Kitty Hawk / and ended in Sputnik.” The tone includes not a simper of lachrymosity for some mythic, ideal time. “The poems included here,” Goldbarth’s introduction continues, “are meant to elegize.”
(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)
