Carol Smallwood/Book Review
Meter is often challenging for any poet to handle and it is discussed with easy to understand examples, definitions. It has the best chapter on meter I’ve run across and should help even the most timid poet—or even those accomplished in using it.
Greg Stewart- On Location/New York
The name Knockdown Center comes from the fact that the “knock-down” door style, which could be assembled from a variety of pieces on construction sites, was created here in this factory space under the Manhattan Door Factory. Before that it was a glass factory under the auspices of Gleason-Tiebout. The open courtyard space has an overloaded bike rack, a handful of cars, and a few twenty-somethings milling about with cigarettes dangling from their lips and fingers. The theater-style sign draws in anyone who may walk past, with the name of the venue, the promise of a bar, and nothing more.
Holly Day/3 poems
three poems by holly day
Painting Rust & Blood and Salsa – Tom Bradley Review
Full disclosure: Jonathan Penton is this reviewer’s fraternal twin. That’s right. The author currently under examination was parturated clinging onto my red-hairy ankle. He entered upon this particular incarnation all primed to fuck me out of my birthright for some dribbles of lentil soup the color of blood, salsa and unpainted rust. So, how have I managed, in this strange critique, to approach my rival sibling’s stuff with such an unjaundiced eye? Is it due to the magisterial disinterestedness of my critical faculty?
Perhaps it’s just because—as I’ve suddenly come to realize, now that Bradley’s Complaint has been duly lodged and I’ve delivered myself of my authorial pet peeve—I don’t give a fuck. I don’t even recognize the notion of birthright.
Dzvinia Orlowsky/3 Poems
Invisible Departures —internally displaced persons, Crimea, 2015 How long before choosing to kiss an angel’s hand, to reach for heaven’s fruit-bearing boughs— the bee not disturbed too drunk— How swollen the seeds of heavy-headed...
Paul Sohar/Poetry
The senior nurse leads the march out of the room, clutching the garbage bag to her
respectable spare tire, leaving the night table open and empty.
Merton as Mentor
With his Columbia University degrees in literature, including a master’s thesis on the poetry and imagery of the Romantic poet William Blake, his experience teaching at Columbia and at St. Bonaventure, and his many years teaching at Gethsemani—four years as master of scholastics and ten years as master of novices (frequently using literature in his classes)—Merton’s evaluation was also encouraging …
George Preston Nelson, Poetry
Through the “Door to the River” I See AAA no Brechtian “earthquakes to come,’' only cool Coltranian chromatic riffs ascending/descending Giant Steps tween heaven and house, notes runnin-t-getha in clefs of black juice poured between strokes of the calligrapher’s...
William Wolak/Poetry & Collage
Unpredictable Pleasures You’re a shipwreck rusting into sand, but keep the wind’s sighing inside your tattered sails even when the world seems cold as a coffin’s white silk lining. Like the breathlessness of sparks, the unpredictable pleasures of love always...
Dante Distefano/Poetry
A gun rack tickles your ribcage when you
make love in the extended cab’s back seat.
You shoot the breeze with angels and sing hymns
that harmonize buckshot and wildflower.
Dio-genes Abreau/Poetry
you follow the vines,
the leafless branches that one day would die
knowing the joy gravitating between your arms
as body and soul come together in the same dance;
George Nelson Preston/How I Met Pablo Neruda
“Venceremos” was a cry that I constantly heard. Cuba was a beehive of armed citizens, milicianos and regulars. I knew of the invasion talk back home and I wondered how in the world a country armed in this fashion could be subdued. Little did I know that the debacle of the disastrously failed CIA sponsored beach-head at Bahia de Cochinos and La Cienega de Zapata would be a total route with Fidel himself commanding from the turret of a former Cuban Army battle tank.
Darren Demaree/Poetry
EMILY AS A DEER HEART I put my teeth to Emily. I left an identifiable impression there. All crimes committed amidst that mythology will carry my name with them. This season, I hunted so lazily & since I could not take a bite of her with me, I knew that I would...
John L. Stanizzi/Poetry
WALMART The knuckled trailer park rests in topsy repose on a plinth of ledge beside paltry little Windham Airport whose main function is flying people up so they can skydive down, and where every now and then at dusk a Cessna’s vesper whispers across the wide sky...
Alan Britt/Poetry
PLANTING A SEED (For many people) In the back room with Van Morrison. In the back room. In the back of the back room with Duckett & Beaz, back somewhere below purple azaleas, on our backs & on the back of a B&O retiree's gold-plated swan song. In the...
Peter Thabit Jones/Poetry
HERON: MONTEREY WHARF, CALIFORNIA Heron, hunchbacked, Drab chapel-grey, Bedraggled loner, Still as a statue On guard, staring Away and stood In a calmness Perfected since birth. What is a moment In unbothered composure? The ridiculous legs, The ungainly posture, The...
Catharine Lucas/Poetry
AFTERMATH Big Sur, California, May 2009 Phosphorescent green flickers against wet dark, fire in another tongue Memorials of trees, stripped bare, black as mummies, stand witness Leaf-laden alders, parchment ghosts, testify in blanched whispers Our dead...
Alita Pirkopf/Poetry
TEAHO-- USE IN THE JAPANESE GARDEN The young man and the ancient Japanese flute make sounds like breath and wind, like rain and river, make sounds that soar—like birds— sounds that sing— toward evening’s silence, sounds we are told, of water dripping— from the...