“He views literacy as the foundation of liberal democracy; if the foundation crumbles, the edifice collapses. The shift away from print has stoked a broader crisis.”
“I got used to being silent, to digging holes / inside where I bury / frivolous thoughts, unvoiced / impressions after a dumb movie, / untold stories, unimplemented / conversations, unforgettable views. // Wherever I dig, however, / I get to you.”
“I’m not anti-cerebral. I’m anti-only-cerebral. And I’m not here to be some poetry mall cop terrorizing people on my Segway — poets should do what pleases them and disregard any opinion that doesn’t help them make their work.”
“I arrived at Holly’s apartment at the end of June, one week after graduation. Holly hadn’t been able to attend, she couldn’t take time from work, but she watched a recording of me crossing the stage. She saw me tossing my cap.”
“Solnit sees the photos as a sly commentary on human capacity to memory-hole humanity’s destruction of the environment. The Bay, she writes, is ‘the region’s half-forgotten heart'”
“In myth, death comes by boat. / Or midway upon the journey of our life. / I think about it, the closest I’ve come to death …”
“When I imagine T. S. Eliot / writing ‘I should / have been a pair / of ragged claws, / scuttling / across the floors of silent seas,’ / he is not in Munich, / but sitting on my toilet.”
“Your Wikipedia page states that you were ‘ostensibly an Anglo-Saxon princess of whom almost nothing is known and whose existence has been questioned.’
I don’t want to live inside a browser.”
“Goldberg does not exactly make desperation look like fun, but she confronts that condition with swagger and elan, with the confidence of a consummate technician, and above all … tenacity”
“There are just one body soap and one shampoo. They smell like herbs. ‘They’re made by a local girl named Aina. She also makes balms for muscle pain and lacerations,’ she tells me. I just look at her. ‘It could be good for your scar.'”
“There is no doubt. Had I lived / when any of you lived, / I would have been committed // to an asylum.”
“Bachmann’s search for the language of genuine human connection, her radical vulnerability, and her passionate stance against fascism come across as more vital than ever.”
“feel free to tell a story or / two about them // feel free to see / that you also / are becoming / an anecdote or two”
“I think of Armantrout’s work as a multi-decade enchantment with the process of cognition as she encounters our culture and tangles with popular notions.”
“We simply split the book in two, each taking a half. We then produce near-final drafts of our respective sections and share them, each editing the other’s work. Then there’s a final readthrough to iron out any remaining problems or inconsistencies.”
“In 2021, near the conclusion of a two-year residency at the Swedenborg Society in London, Chloe Aridjis was asked to tell a series of stories, not using words, as she was accustomed to doing, but images projected by a magic lantern.”
“After a long day, the staff needed to unwind. Alcohol was abundant. Paul R., responsible for moving the bodies to the incinerator, missed the celebration for the ten-thousandth victim and only received a bottle of beer …”
“Tendril moves / inexactly toward light / as if it sees the streaky sky / through bracken / from its dead-end cranny”
” … into the poem like the branches / holding this fort, first his, // then mine, what he built and / abandoned like our family …”
“Dralyuk deserves praise for his archival work of recovery and representation of an essential American story … and for slipping seamlessly into a voice that produces parody, self-deprecation, and honest humility.”
“There’s an Escher-like destabilization that moves through Metzger’s poems, a constant shifting of perspectives and emotional tenors that can lead to a moment of freedom.”
“The ordeal comes in the morning, when adorable little routines cease being routine — every little thing, however little, carries barbaric resonance.”
“Once he felt old enough, he offered, ‘Why worry if it doesn’t improve or solve whatever you’re worried about?’ “’You just wait,’ she said. Now she lay on her deathbed, and he worried he couldn’t reach her — dementia.”
“It’s snowing at the bottom of the sea — / dead skin, dead plants, sand, soot, dust, and shit / falling from the light into Earth’s deepest hole.”
“Once, in the other life, I had no name, / and only the insides of the insides / of things glowed. Now I feel cobblestones // of Marrakech rush up again through my feet …”
“Channeling the voices of dozens of real former mental patients, the book’s pages witness no small complement of suffering and strife, but with a certain equanimity.”
“Misreading is in the atmosphere, even as the sentence that holds that atmosphere remains lucid, intact, answerable to itself.”
“The fire crackles / the forest whispers to it / another legend.”
“The macro-view may be an illusion. And that is the preoccupation of Carousel, a series of striking moments of speculation, anecdotes, and history that pass by, or that the reader passes as if on a text-carousel.”
“river carry me forward / from my displacement // from my place between rivers”
“The indissoluble weight of the poet’s intersecting identities informs how they feel about poetry as a whole and, therefore, how they choose to wield it.”
“How thin the line between the eye / and darkness that runs like a thread / in the hem of a dress …”
“I visit him every Christmas / where everything is dry in the vacuumed / memory sealed by death: the cracked / beds of his thumbs …”
“Aristide taps into the frustrations, precocity, and innocence of childhood to lead readers into the dread experienced by Romanians during Ceaușescu’s regime.”
“When questions and doubts surface about my writing life, often triggered by the harrowing reality of our world, I return to Diane Seuss’ poem “Poetry,” whose speaker bluntly asks, ‘What can poetry be now?'”
“A man reads a newspaper on the sixth floor. / He looks up and out at the open-air —/ once a wall, now an overhang, cliff of brick bombed last month.”
“As Diggs Colbert writes, ‘The women depended on one another more than they even knew. As they went from being ingenues to career starts, they collected and created shared practices for survival.'”
“She registers the private joys and domestic pathos of entrapped lives — reminding us that all women, privileged or not, face continuing obstacles.”
“… You count them off: / ghosts with hard bodies and ghosts / with wet tongues, ghosts with slick fingers / and convincing eyes …”
“Blitz of sun off blade, six a.m. Phạm Văn Hai Street, the butcher / drags two glinting metal bowls onto the sidewalk …”
“Let the smell remind us / that we’re not that far / from the deep belch // and thunder of tanks …”