JAY AQUINAS THOMPSON
7: Spearlike (from LIKE HONEY)
rosemary bough in breeze a lady in sunglasses / it’s easy to get married
rosemary bough in breeze a lady in sunglasses / it’s easy to get married
Jay Aquinas Thompson on poetry from the latest issue of The Tiny
In which our writers examine noteworthy work being published in contemporary poetry journals.
Jay Aquinas Thompson on Oversound, Issue 5
Jay Aquinas Thompson on Valerie Mejer Caso’s This Blue Novel
by Jay Aquinas Thompson | Associate Editor
By Jay Aquinas Thompson | Contributing Editor
The Quotations of Bone Norman Dubie Copper Canyon, 2015 No one goes to a Norman Dubie poem for grace. Whether in his celebrated earlier work, rooted in historical monologue, or his poetry since the 90’s, evocative of a strange and flowing historical present, Dubie’s poems are characterized by hair-raising imagery, ponderous disjunction, and a proclivity for weighty philosophical questions. In one section of “The Fallen Bird of the Fields,” among the best poems in his twenty-ninth book, The Quotations of Bone, he collapses time around a family killed in a horrific car wreck: …the smoke there since morning, a feint or slight off a coroner’s cigar— his Cuban cologne over the father’s burst stomach with undigested painkillers there like glistening fish roe, row all your poor wooden boats gently away from me, this old woman crippled with a bitter affection for these lost broken-pottery cultures that dug this canal a thousand years before the early morning and the dead children singing— here comes the sun— for their mother’s breakfast. The “fish roe” horror …
By Jay Aquinas Thompson | Contributing Editor | I’m looking for new ways to make sense.