“The Moon,” a poem by 2009 alum Chloe Martinez, was recently featured in Poetry Northwest. Read an excerpt below:
The Moon
If we can put a man on the moon,
surely we can figure this out.
If the man puts out the moon,
we can surely put that man-figure out.
The moon can-cans on. Man insures.
We put out this figure: If.
Put a figure on the can. We can out this,
we can moon-man on. Surely.
Read the poem in its entirety here: https://www.poetrynw.org/chloe-martinez-the-moon/
2019 fiction alum Lynnette Curtis was recently featured in the High Desert Journal. Read an excerpt of “Lazarus” below:
Mornings that long-ago summer, the sun consumed the sky. The suburban air smelled of hot asphalt and absence. We wore nylon shorts and his-and-her sunhats on our miserable walks. We carried 30-ounce water bottles and our own immeasurable grief.
Along Windmill, the cicadas buzzed. Most of our neighbors remained cocooned inside their cool stucco homes while the two of us sweated and suffered, darting like lizards between patches of shade provided by the occasional palm or purple plum tree.
And then an ancient, stooped man would appear, out on a walk of his own. We would watch in amazement as he drew nearer in his faded dress shoes, shapeless trousers, dark corduroy blazer and derby cap.
This was in July, remember, in Las Vegas.
The old man’s face looked dry as parchment, his expression serene, as though he had acclimated to this harsh desert climate generations ago, or discovered some secret to staying comfortable and eternally alive on this disinterested planet.
We forgot our discomfort—and sometimes even our despair—for a moment, our torsos like overheating engines. We slowed our pace and studied the old man as he shuffled toward us on the sidewalk. His small feet lifted almost imperceptibly with each tiny step, as though he were floating or dancing, without a care in the world.
Read the story in its entirety here: https://highdesertjournal.squarespace.com/lynnette-curtis-lazarus/
Poetry alum Madison Mainwaring was recently featured in Quarterly West. Read an excerpt of her poem “Eight Belles” below:
Eight Belles
They say that fillies give too much
of themselves, don’t know when
to stop, will run to would-be sweet freedom, to
ruin under the wide skies.
Since 1875, only forty female horses
have raced in the Kentucky Derby.
The first to win was called “Regret.”
Her owner had wanted a boy.
Legs going everywhere,
Eight Belles’s trainer said.
She always stumbled when pulling up.
We call it
horsepower. We call it love,
this bull heart gone wild on
legs as dainty as the toothpick furniture
in a dollhouse.
Read the poem in its entirety here: https://www.quarterlywest.com/issue-101-mainwaring
2017 poetry alum Amanda Newell recently interviewed fellow 2017 graduate Nomi Stone for Plume. Read an excerpt of their conversation below:
AN: I’m interested in the ways in which your poetry contemplates the relationship between the self and the community and the ways in which community shapes identity. Your first two poetry collections, Stranger’s Notebook (TriQuarterly 2008) and Kill Class (Tupelo Press, 201), both involve a speaker who is welcomed, to some degree, into an “other” community—and in the case of Kill Class, she is observing a military community, but always aware of her difference. This requires a sort of double vision, no?
NS: I love this question of double vision, Amanda. My first two collections of poetry were yes driven by the charge of the insider-outsider position and also questions of identity: in Stranger’s Notebook, although I am Jewish and the daughter of a reform Rabbi, I spent time in a more traditional Jewish community in North Africa to press on the valves of something that I wanted to understand: what is faith, what is ritual, what is belonging, what is relationship to homeland, and why did these questions produce such friction for me? In Kill Class, I was doing my anthropological fieldwork for my dissertation, and I observed some US military pre-deployment training exercises in mock Middle Eastern villages around America to write about war.
Anthropology’s key method for fieldwork is so-called “participant-observation”—and the poems in Kill Class are poems of witness, poems of uneasy participation, and poems of complicity. I am not in the American military (observer) and I write to critique the military (critique); however, I am an American citizen. As such I am entangled (participant). This brings me to your question of double vision, which paradoxically creates both twofoldness but also sometimes halfness. The so-called “field” was always elsewhere, and I was at its edge, working through self/other, here/there, field/life, work-self/ private-self, where one is perhaps often engaging with both, but sometimes only one at a time, and potentially occluding or sidelining the other.
My new collection of poems in progress, Fieldworkers of the Sublime tries to explode “fieldwork” beyond anthropology, pushing against the binary between Field and Life, and letting being-alive overflow in every direction. It is a book about awe, about fear, and also the ways we are each observers and participants in the sublime (through nature, science, the social world, and intimate life). It is a manuscript about love and my new marriage and queerness and desire and my attempts to overcome my own limits, as well as the thinkers (mostly anthropologists and philosophers) who shape my imagination.
The poems are also populated with marine biologists and octopus dissections, botanists and chanterelle-foragers— and my encounters with scientists and others I’ve become friends with on the island of Mull off the West Coast of Scotland, my wife’s beloved home. But this book is not trying to understand a particular community or a problem the way my other two were: it is instead a bid for an embodied poetics with fewer partitions and more encounters. My poems have become more capacious, letting everything in: the ocean and gooseberries of the island, but also the shopping malls and playgrounds of my suburban childhood—each spangling open through conversations and memory and dreaming and feeling and loving and reading.
You can read the interview in its entirety here: https://plumepoetry.com/on-queer-poetics-writing-courageously-and-becoming-otherwise-an-interview-with-nomi-stone-by-amanda-newell/
Cynthia Dewi Oka, a 2019 graduate, recently published a visual poem in Adi Magazine. Read (and see) the poem here: https://adimagazine.com/articles/ma-a-multidisciplinary-state/
William Burnside, a 2018 poetry graduate, was recently featured in Zocalo Public Square. Read an excerpt of “To Go To Belfast” below:
To Go To Belfast
Whether you’ve boarded from Liverpool or Heysham
or Stranraer, years later the journey is the same
along the Lough at evening, the chimney of the power station
in Kilroot, Carrickfergus Castle, white eiders skimming
the surface of the bay at Carnalea, the oystercatchers at Cultra
piping on the rocks, as you slide past the gantries at the yards
where David and Goliath tower like the spires
of a decayed cathedral. Here’s where I first heard
hexameters of Homer intoned in harsh Ulster accents,
Speak to me, Muse, about the many-sided hero who travelled
far and wide after he sacked the great town of Troy:
many were the cities he visited, the customs he came to know
Here’s where my grandfather built the Titanic.
Here there were two cathedrals rising in opposition
and two stories each told with a certainty dispensed
like a cheap drug, with hatred scribbled on the walls,
King William on his horse, Up the Rebels, to Hell
with the Pope, and one man’s hope was another’s
damnation. How could I not be tempted by the glory
that was Greece, lucidity and sanity, a golden mean between
opposing ills, Athens revered in the words of Pericles?
We are an example to others rather than imitators. Our
administration favours the many instead of the few; this is why it is
called a democracy. Our laws afford equal justice to all…
Read the poem in its entirety here: https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2020/10/30/william-burnside-belfast-poem/chronicles/poetry/
2018 poetry graduate Carlos Andrés Gómez was recently featured in Underbelly. Read an excerpt of his poem “Pronounced” below:
Pronounced
You excavate anything that has tried to lodge itself
in your body without permission. You bury the toothbrush
between your back molars and scrape whatever
you find. One loss makes you feel all other losses.
Eleven years later, when you no longer eat pizza
or speak Spanish, when your father’s profile invades
your clenched jawline, you borrow his brisk gait,
his snort, his face. People say you look white.
Your father never does. The restaurant won’t seat
you, the hostess says neither of you meet the dress
code (your father’s wearing a double-breasted suit).
You are a man trying to roll your r’s again…
Read the poem in its entirety, see an early draft of the poem, and hear about Gómez’s creative process here: https://www.underbellymag.com/carlos-andres-gomez
The LEON Literary Review recently featured “The Switch,” a poem by 2020 graduate Michael A. de Armas. Read an excerpt below:
The Switch
Yes it’s true you can break things,
I tell my younger daughter one night, who,
after crying in her crib in our room
without much result, turns the light switch
on and off and so makes her need known
to an entire city block, even boats out in the bay
see the wild flicker of her distress…
Read the poem in its entirety here: http://leonliteraryreview.com/2020/09/michael-a-de-armas-the-switch/
“Two Chairs,” a poem by 2020 graduate Lizzy Beck, was recently featured in the LEON Literary Review. Read an excerpt below:
Two Chairs
Beside the health center you saw two chairs:
wooden, solid, placed
just so, as in a draftsman’s rendering.
They sat inside a bed of daffodils—
not two-toned
but yellow all the way through. The chairs
were empty. Had to be. You had a momentary
wish to meet
the giddy gardener who had planted daffodils
right up to the chairs’ legs, so the chairs would be
swimming in blooms,
the seats like placid rafts the yellow waters
sometimes lapped. If you pick your way through,
delicate and discerning
in your bare feet, you must then raise your legs
out of the cluster, cross them well, and sit
as if an island.
You must commit to quiet…
Read the poem in its entirety here: http://leonliteraryreview.com/2020/09/lizzy-beck-two-chairs/
Perry Janes, a July 2019 poetry graduate, was recently featured in the LEON Literary Review. Read an excerpt of “Shooter” below:
Shooter
There are things I don’t know,
can’t know, and maybe don’t want to,
including what a man’s teeth look like
through a rifle’s magnifying scope. Tonight
a frightened anchor on the radio reports
a gunman stalking Interstate 96 firing
into backseats, windshields, drivers behaving
erratically, causing pile-ups. I’m sick of
God and his potholes, the many mouths
opening relentlessly, beneath…
Read the poem in its entirety here: http://leonliteraryreview.com/2020/09/perry-janes-shooter/
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