Field Note: Birds of Prey on the Highway
“What I have discovered in my adult life, in my driving and commuting life, is that I love birds of prey.” —M. Soledad Caballero
All posts filed under: Essays
Prose that encourages us to engage with books of poetry, individual poets, and issues of craft or poetics.
Absence as a Silhouette: On Writing Becoming Ribbons
“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.”
Re/Mark-Able: Black Women Poets’ 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.”
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 world’s strictures, its demands.”
The Palinode’s Ethics of Questioning
“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.”
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.” –Indira Dahlstrom
Love: A Diptych: An Evolving Inquiry on Jack Gilbert and Linda Gregg
“The premise is that everything is a lie.” –Afton Montgomery
The Many Desires of Kate Baer
“The trouble with wanting . . . is that the relationship between the public and private self’s desires is an ever-evolving matter.” –Margot Kahn
Giving Prominence
“Under Reginald Dwayne Betts’s watch, redaction becomes a beacon . . . a lightness under the weight shines through.” –Stacy D. Flood
An Intimate Provocation: Jenny Xie’s 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?” –an essay by CMarie Fuhrman