Re/Mark-Able: Black Women Poetsâ Punctuation(!
“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.”
All posts filed under: Essays
Prose that encourages us to engage with books of poetry, individual poets, and issues of craft or poetics.
The Poet as Shadow-Homer, as Odyssean Penelope
“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 worldâs strictures, its demands.”
The Palinodeâs Ethics of Questioning
“The tension of a palinode comes from admitting a blindness that needs to be addressedâto expose the story of your old poem as a preconceived myth.”
Flight by Flame: On Chris Abani’s Smoking the Bible
“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.” âIndira Dahlstrom
Love: A Diptych: An Evolving Inquiry on Jack Gilbert and Linda Gregg
“The premise is that everything is a lie.” âAfton Montgomery
The Many Desires of Kate Baer
“The trouble with wanting . . . is that the relationship between the public and private selfâs desires is an ever-evolving matter.” âMargot Kahn
Giving Prominence
“Under Reginald Dwayne Bettsâs watch, redaction becomes a beacon . . . a lightness under the weight shines through.” âStacy D. Flood
An Intimate Provocation: Jenny Xieâs The Rupture Tense
“To whom do we belong? Those whom we can see in photographs? Those we encounter in story? Or those we know in our blood?” âan essay by CMarie Fuhrman
Alter-Energies: The Vitalities of Absence in Moby Dick
“Such a world is one of interpenetrating energiesâa large, looming but luminous consciousness, in which we ourselves might be but a half-articulate idea.” âDan Beachy-Quick
âNo country but our centuryâ: Wong May, Poet of Lostness
“No matter how far you stray, your origin beckons you.”