“The social utility of photojournalism has eroded as images are Photoshopped, morphed, repeated, and politicized in ways that make even outsize tragedies feel mundane.”
“But I’m now tattered sliced / assaulted. / The gulls cry as if they miss / water yet it’s near. / What if you’re the water I miss?”
“Constantine Cavafy, a half-closeted gay man, and Ida von Pechmann, a matronly housewife from Bavaria half-adjusted to Alexandrian society, had little in common except for the fact that they lived and wrote in the same place.”
“At the funeral mass, my father asked me to tie his tie. / A parishioner approached, and asked him who died. / My wife, he said, every word an elevation to climb.”
“The book’s most trenchant theme: science is shaped and driven by the political and cultural values of the individuals and institutions that fund investigations, whether private endowments or the federal government.”
“I solved all the problems, all / the road blocks // to world peace, yesterday, while / under the influence // at the dentist.”
“Life descends, we can walk / The footstep illuminates / The immense fear of being oneself in time // Our two almond hands are steel gates // And, look, how all the love of forests was needed / To adopt the eyes of the invisible.”
“Interactions, small gestures, and supposition attain sharp profiles in contrast to the dystopian surround. Rescuing language from its servile usages is Gliff’s essential occurrence.”
“It felt so stupid to be afraid / of you. Still does. / Thinking I would be safe / if I became the place to hide.”
“I’d like to see a more diverse field where people join the translation profession from many different backgrounds, rather than only via academia or publishing contacts.”
“Nevermore is a … record of the act of translation as an all-consuming thought process … Wajsbrot could not have created such a complete account of a translator’s experience without having herself translated Woolf’s The Waves …”
?I’m addressing you, invader of my dream, / with your guns-and-God tattoo, your slow car // driving over the day lilies, circling back / to mock my lawn sign’s love …”
“The gardener raged, rattled high-speed after the Porsche — in a pickup truck hitched to a trailer full of fertilizer. He pursued, but didn’t come close …”
“… a wise and haunting book that permits the reader to draw conclusions as it chronicles one man’s journey through the frequent trembles of life.”
“Then I sat reading a book about the women who clean / other people’s houses, written by one of the women / homeowners. I thought about how the world is divided / between the books you start to read and the ones you don’t.”
“The damaged thing, the life we all sustain and witness, may suffer in fragments, but Hardy proceeds fiercely, not tempted to illuminate the shards gaudily for the sake of a facile empathy.”
“Although Sorokin’s more satirical aspects seem like they could be used to recreate an accurate portrayal of the society he’s mocking, there are other moments that feel more prescient in their ire.”
“the threads that tie you to this life will break / and break you / again and again you will remember the warmth / that resides in the garment is not the garment itself”
“Death, the meaning of life and contact with that which defies naming are recurring leitmotifs … Rader approaches these themes with the help of the dialogical method of maieutics, which helps the interlocutor to gain knowledge through targeted questioning.”
“Barrett: ‘I had little sense … of how essential chaos is, how great a role serendipity, intuition, and timing play. How much waste is essential.'”
“you strike the month of february like a short match / punch the blue pill of tranquility from the foil packet / what was your name?”
“The cumulative effect of reading the new stories is that you feel changed by them, intoxicated, as if you expect something very different from reality after having tasted Bertino’s version.”
“This was the same location where my parents ran a roadhouse that burned to the ground the year after we all graduated. My dad was in the midst of a mid-life crisis, at least that’s how he saw it.”
“That dark’s too dark to measure distance true — / have you edged close to what I fear for you …”
“Bumblebees has the kinetic energy of recycling, rearranging, assembling — not simply a way to look at art, but also a method we can follow in our attempts to mitigate the planet’s degradation.”
“The fragments we shore against our ruin are consolations, at best.”
“Winter dulls the world and / the yearly deaths begin. / I can see a distance through the woods now.”
“Foust’s precise language is the ultimate rebuke to forces seeking to erase ‘our shared & stored history’ and she’s frank in expressing the limits of what an individual can do against state-sponsored confusion.”
“Pagans love poetry / they use it to enchant their gods and their kings, / to curse other gods and kings.”
“Last night the moon shone so near, it seemed / a neighbor’s yard had flung its sundial skyward, // time to give a proper send-off to the cosmos”
“Fifteen minutes into the rain, the papier-mâché torso / of the makeshift guerrilla statue gets soggy // and the likeness of the dissident hero / bows to every passing commuter.”
“The protagonist is an unnamed female captain of a cargo ship who, despite a typical childhood of family, school, and love, always felt different, and prone to taking flight and disappearing.”
“The tensions in contemporary American poetry created by sibling rivalries, ageism, and histrionics are like junk food –– they’re plentiful, and have an addictive taste and empty calories.”
“He puts his birthplace down as Brooklyn, of which he knows nothing. When he was a baby he was rescued from Brooklyn. Beside his stats: he hails from.”
“As if the fox while I was fasting / had run a blade / slit its prey / gobbled the guts & // left a skeletal coat …”