Read this article about Fred Sasaki from The Chicago Reader:
Fred Sasaki, the poetry promoter – Chicago Reader
The People Issue: Fred Sasaki, associate editor of Poetry and founder of the annual Printers’ Ball
Watch Fred Sasaki read some of his work:
you have lipstick on your collar I say
to my father the priest that’s just the Blood
of Christ my son he replies by and by
(the milky thigh of Mary in my mind)
– Anthony Opal, “Sonnet”
Read this interview with Anthony Opal from The Conversant:
http://theconversant.org/?p=4074
dear god-and-a-half dear action painter
dear compassionate sloth and hammerhead
shark who willingly gave up the hammer
– Anthony Opal, “Action”
It doesn’t matter
if this river is listening. It’s not
from around here, and it’s not staying.
– Maggie Smith, “River”
Read this interview with Maggie Smith from Tupelo Quarterly:
Wise & Fierce Beauty: Maggie Smith’s The Well Speaks of its Own Poison
When I encountered Maggie Smith’s poetry manuscript The Well Speaks of its Own Poison, winner of Tupelo Press’ 2012 Dorset Prize, I knew, immediately, that I was in the presence of the real thing. There is wise, fierce, and truthful beauty here, the muscular craft to carry it across time and place, and both the […]
There are fish in the black trenches
of the sea that look like rocks.
Their poison shouldn’t trouble me.
– Maggie Smith, “Stonefish”
Watch this video adaptation of Maggie Smith’s poem “Good Bones”:
Maybe it was the part in Runaway Bunny
where the mother rabbit grows wings
and becomes part bird to find her offspring
that grew in me a certainty that the disappeared
would always come back
– Marty McConnell, “The Gift”
Read this interview with Marty McConnell from 300 Questions:
17/30: Ten Questions With Marty McConnell
Marty McConnellI saw this interview with Michael Jordan once where he talked about that game vs. The Blazers. The one where he hit all of those threes and shrugged. He said the game was happening in slow motion for him. That everything was coming at him, and he was absorbing all of it, becoming a…
the noise
from the party a backdrop
of garbled babble and laughter,
wind against the windows,
the occasional casualty of glass.
– Marty McConnell, “West Barry Street”
Watch Marty McConnell read this poem:
Not vinegar. Not acid. Not
sugarcane pressed to mortar by
fist, but salt: salt, the home taste; salt,
the tide; salt, the blood.
– R. A. Villanueva, “Archipelagic”
Read this interview with R. A. Villanueva from Divedapper:
DIVEDAPPER // R.A. Villanueva
“Poetry is trying, it seems to me, to conceive of how our universe works. “
Tonight, my mother paints her nails
black—a shade she names, “Dark Matter.”
She numbers what’s left of her cells,
tells us of this burning inside
her knees, laughs a promise to fight.
– R. A. Villanueva, “When Doves”
Watch R. A. Villanueva read his work:
Another time after she left
I saw a headless woman
hurrying after her like a jaguar.
– Rachel Eliza Griffiths, “Discrepancies Regarding My Mother’s Departure”
Read this interview with Rachel Eliza Griffiths from The Rumpus:
The Rumpus Interview with Rachel Eliza Griffiths – The Rumpus
Rachel Eliza Griffiths’s Mule & Pear is one of the most affecting books of poetry I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading
I pick you up
& you are a child made of longing
clasped to my neck. Iridescent,
lovely, your inestimable tantrums,
I carry you back & forth
from the famine in your mind.
– Rachel Eliza Griffiths, “Dear America”
Watch Rachel Eliza Griffiths read some of her work:
A Four Way Books Salon: Rachel Eliza Griffiths
No Description
Featuring:
Hannah Keene, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago
“fortunes wrapped around a wounded nest” by Hannah Keene
Excerpt from a reading of two poems by Hannah Keene for HI typ/O 11 at The Side Project Theatre, July 2014.
Josh Fisher, DePaul University
Hannah Brooks-Motl, University of Chicago
Jim Davis, Northwestern University
Teresa McMahon, Columbia College
You miss it, craning
away from verdancy.
Pause in this place
while I glaze you;
my head tilts
a direction you can’t read.
– Sandra Marchetti, “Sur l’herbe”
Read this interview with Sandra Marchetti from So to Speak Journal:
http://sotospeakjournal.org/poem-conversation-with-sandra-marchetti/
I listen to your fishing
story and wonder,
does anyone cook
the catch anymore?
– Sandra Marchetti, “Imagination”
Watch Sandra Marchetti read her work at Waterline Writers:
https://vimeo.com/90143266
low red door I enter in
the desert slaked by rain
in this a kind of format
an interstice a splice
between the sad time
and the next sad time
– Alix Anne Shaw, “Parturition”
Watch Alix Anne Shaw read her work:
My friends, the kind weather is over. On the street, I turn my eyes
from the men who wait at the corner, poised to pry the slightest
opening. The sign says please break boxes, but it looks like please
– Alix Anne Shaw, “Schrödinger’s Cat is Mine Now”
When is an embrace the
antithesis of hunger? Restrain,
re-train, recite the words you
learned again: the payoff,
– Lana Rakhman, “XIII.”
They are young. They are looking
at their future grave. At their past
grave. Already with two feet
in the grave, who will cut flowers down
for them?
– Lana Rakhman, “Black & White Photograph, 1982”
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