Poetry faculty member Sandra Lim recently had a poem featured in The New Republic. Read an excerpt of “That Are” below:

That Are

Then I became this stupid, trilling thing:
what I desired was to become obscene.

All the things I had loved up to then
fell away in the long struggle between winter and spring.

And then there was my body, inside of my soul.
It had different aspirations.

What form does it take without the soul?

Find the rest of this poem at The New Republic.

The Rumpus recently interviewed poetry graduate Victoria Chang about her latest collection, Obit. Read an excerpt below:

The Rumpus: Obit got deep really quickly! I would say it’s a book about grieving.

Victoria Chang: Yes, although it’s not about one specific kind of grieving. I wanted to describe how awful a person can feel in the process of any kind of grieving. Putting words to that depth of pain, and breadth of pain, and a pain that is so unidentifiable, that doesn’t want to be snatched or grabbed or touched. In essence, I think, in hindsight, I tried to distill grief and give language to something I knew would be impossible to describe. Ultimately, I think I failed, because I don’t think grief can be described. I think, in retrospect, it was a challenge to see if it could be done anyway.

Rumpus: How did you get the idea to put obituary poems into a collection?

Chang: I just started writing them once the idea of writing one popped into my head. I wrote one, then another, then another, and another, and just kept on going for two weeks straight. I hardly ate, hardly slept, and hardly spoke to anyone….

Read the rest of the interview here: https://therumpus.net/2020/04/the-rumpus-interview-with-victoria-chang-2/

“The Sorry-Ass Truth,” a story by fiction alumna Tracy Winn, was recently featured in the Four Way Review. Read an excerpt below:

The Sorry-Ass Truth

The Blackhawk hunkers in the pasture by the river like a video game beast, spiky and dark. Mikey slogs toward the helicopter, soaked with tiredness, lugging the baby, her ticket out. She’s ready to lie down in the sopping field, sink her banged-up body deep into the mess left by the flood and skip whatever comes next. But she has thirty-seven thousand dollars waiting for her in New York City. 
            A bug-eyed town official and a National Guard trooper with tattoos up to his ears scan a clipboard next to the chopper, which hasn’t started up yet.
            Mikey holds the baby the way she’s seen other new mothers do it, rapt, like she’s in love. She can’t feel bad for being hell-bent. When the streams overflowed they washed out the roads, the power and phone lines drowned, the cell tower collapsed. The storm made an island of the town—cut the place off from even the nearest mountains. This ride is the only way out.

Read the rest of Winn’s story here: http://fourwayreview.com/the-sorry-ass-truth-by-tracy-winn/

“where water has no skin,” a poem by J.C. Todd (Poetry ’90), was recently featured on Parks & Points. Read an excerpt below:

where water has no skin

no boundary, no bank or basin

where air is ambient water

            a saturate, a cloud

where mosses swim, tethered by fiber

            to the leafy canopy they populate

aerial dancers unlike the crouched tufts

            underfoot on the trail

Read the rest of this poem here: https://www.parksandpoints.com/poetry-2020/where-water-has-no-skin

Poetry graduate Victoria Chang recently reflected on her collection of poems, “Obit,” for the Poetry Society of America. Read an excerpt of this reflection below:

On “Obit”

I have many memories of my mother’s teeth fizzing in a cup in the bathroom. I also remember my mother and her mouth sucked in and her funny talking when her teeth were soaking. When she died, there was the usual cleaning out of her things, deciding what to toss and what to keep. Since this task fell onto me and not my sister, I got first dibs on everything. So I kept my mother’s teeth. She must have had her main dentures in her mouth when she was cremated so this must have been an old pair or a spare.

I’ve learned so much about grief and myself since my mother’s death. Grieving in some ways, is a mirror or proxy of one’s personality. I learned that I preferred to grieve privately. Once, while in the garage alone, I opened the blue plastic container with my mother’s teeth in them. It was a strange experience, holding someone’s teeth in my hands. I, like my mother, have a strong nose. The teeth smelled like her. I sat in the garage, alone, sobbing from a smell I had never once considered before. A smell that was probably just Polident.

My understanding of grief before my mother died was very shallow. The ending of this poem addresses that shallowness—I couldn’t even get its grammar right. There was so much to learn, so much to try and distill. I also felt very alone through this process because I think, looking back on it, there were very few people around me who had experienced a parent dying. Even though my father is still alive, in my mind, the father I knew had died a decade ago from his stroke. But his vessel is still here. My mother’s death was an actual physical death… 

Read the rest of Chang’s reflection here: https://poetrysociety.org/features/in-their-own-words/victoria-chang-on-obit