Commentary on the Birds
An excerpt from Jed Munson’s new collection of essays.
Prose that encourages us to engage with books of poetry, individual poets, and issues of craft or poetics.
An excerpt from Jed Munson’s new collection of essays.
“What I have discovered in my adult life, in my driving and commuting life, is that I love birds of prey.” —M. Soledad Caballero
“Erasure poetics . . . can continue to create that wedge, that finger-hole into seeing a typographic absence as a silhouette of a person or entity that once was.”
“When a black woman poet refuses punctuation, she is refusing more than standard English. She is also refusing to allow the marks of history to (over)determine her writing.”
“Like much-named Penelope, we in the dark hours [like as not] ravel our hatch-worked images. Cunning as Penelope, we must resist, persist, outwit the bully / suitors of our world’s strictures, its demands.”
“The tension of a palinode comes from admitting a blindness that needs to be addressed—to expose the story of your old poem as a preconceived myth.”
“By stitching the mundane to the profound, Abani renders a reclamation of a tender masculinity, an understanding of the relationship between joy and trauma, and a pursuit of the sacred.” –Indira Dahlstrom
“The premise is that everything is a lie.” –Afton Montgomery
“The trouble with wanting . . . is that the relationship between the public and private self’s desires is an ever-evolving matter.” –Margot Kahn
“Under Reginald Dwayne Betts’s watch, redaction becomes a beacon . . . a lightness under the weight shines through.” –Stacy D. Flood